Sleep scoring using artificial neural networks

Classification methods applied to credit scoring: Systematic review and overall comparison

The need for controlling and effectively managing credit risk has led financial institutions to excel in improving techniques designed for this purpose, resulting in the development of various quantitative models by financial institutions and consulting companies. Hence, the growing number of academic studies about credit scoring shows a variety of classification methods applied to discriminate good and bad borrowers. This paper, therefore, aims to present a systematic literature review relating theory and application of binary classification techniques for credit scoring financial analysis. The general results show the use and importance of the main techniques for credit rating, as well as some of the scientific paradigm changes throughout the years.

Classification methods applied to credit scoring: A systematic review and overall comparison

Bankruptcy trajectory reflects the dynamic changes of financial situation of companies, and hence make possible to keep track of the evolution of companies and recognize the important trajectory patterns. This study aims at a compact visualization of the complex temporal behaviors in financial statements. We use self-organizing map (SOM) to analyze and visualize the financial situation of companies over several years through a two-step clustering process. Initially, the bankruptcy risk is characterized by a feature self-organizing map (FSOM), and therefore the temporal sequence is converted to the trajectory vector projected on the map. Afterwards, the trajectory self-organizing map (TSOM) clusters the trajectory vectors to a number of trajectory patterns. The proposed approach is applied to a large database of French companies spanning over four years. The experimental results demonstrate the promising functionality of SOM for bankruptcy trajectory clustering and visualization. From the viewpoint of decision support, the method might give experts insight into the patterns of bankrupt and healthy company development.

Clustering and visualization of bankruptcy trajectory using self-organizing map

Machine learning and artificial intelligence have achieved a human-level performance in many application domains, including image classification, speech recognition and machine translation. However, in the financial domain expert-based credit risk models have still been dominating. Establishing meaningful benchmark and comparisons on machine-learning approaches and human expert-based models is a prerequisite in further introducing novel methods. Therefore, our main goal in this study is to establish a new benchmark using real consumer data and to provide machine-learning approaches that can serve as a baseline on this benchmark. We performed an extensive comparison between the machine-learning approaches and a human expert-based model—FICO credit scoring system—by using a Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) data. As the SCF data is non-synthetic and consists of a large number of real variables, we applied two variable-selection methods: the first method used hypothesis tests, correlation and random forest-based feature importance measures and the second method was only a random forest-based new approach (NAP), to select the best representative features for effective modelling and to compare them. We then built regression models based on various machine-learning algorithms ranging from logistic regression and support vector machines to an ensemble of gradient boosted trees and deep neural networks. Our results demonstrated that if lending institutions in the 2001s had used their own credit scoring model constructed by machine-learning methods explored in this study, their expected credit losses would have been lower, and they would be more sustainable. In addition, the deep neural networks and XGBoost algorithms trained on the subset selected by NAP achieve the highest area under the curve (AUC) and accuracy, respectively.

An Empirical Comparison of Machine-Learning Methods on Bank Client Credit Assessments



The development of an effective credit scoring model has become a very important issue as the credit industry is confronted with ever-intensifying competition and aggravating bad debt problems. During the past few years, a substantial number of studies in the field of statistics have been conducted to improve the accuracy of credit scoring models. In order to refine the classification and decrease misclassification, this paper presents a two-stage model. Focusing on classification, the first stage aims at constructing an artificial neural network (ANN)-based credit scoring model to categorize applicants into the group of accepted (good) credit and the group of rejected (bad) credit. Switching from classification to reassignment, the second stage proceeds to reduce the Type I error by retrieving the originally rejected good credit applicants to conditional acceptance using the Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) classification technique. The proposed model (RST–ANN–CBR) is applied to a credit card dataset to verify its effectiveness. As the results indicate, the proposed model is able to achieve more accurate credit scoring than four other methods; more importantly, it is validated to recover potentially lost customers and to increase business revenues.

Szu-Teng Huang

Papers

A hybrid neural network approach for credit scoring