With the ever-growing achievements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the recent boosted enthusiasm in Financial Technology (FinTech), applications such as credit scoring have gained substantial academic interest. Credit scoring helps financial experts make better decisions regarding whether or not to accept a loan application, such that loans with a high probability of default are not accepted. Apart from the noisy and highly imbalanced data challenges faced by such credit scoring models, recent regulations such as the `right to explanation' introduced by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) have added the need for model interpretability to ensure that algorithmic decisions are understandable and coherent. An interesting concept that has been recently introduced is eXplainable AI (XAI), which focuses on making black-box models more interpretable. In this work, we present a credit scoring model that is both accurate and interpretable. For classification, state-of-the-art performance on the Home Equity Line of Credit (HELOC) and Lending Club (LC) Datasets is achieved using the Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) model. The model is then further enhanced with a 360-degree explanation framework, which provides different explanations (i.e. global, local feature-based and local instance-based) that are required by different people in different situations. Evaluation through the use of functionallygrounded, application-grounded and human-grounded analysis show that the explanations provided are simple, consistent as well as satisfy the six predetermined hypotheses testing for correctness, effectiveness, easy understanding, detail sufficiency and trustworthiness.
Politecnico di Milano（米兰理工大学）；CRIF S.p.A（CRIF股份公司）；University of Bologna（博洛尼亚大学）
The aim of this project is to develop and test advanced analytical methods to improve the prediction accuracy of Credit Risk Models, preserving at the same time the model interpretability. In particular, the project focuses on applying an explainable machine learning model to bank-related databases. The input data were obtained from open data. Over the total proven models, CatBoost has shown the highest performance. The algorithm implementation produces a GINI of 0.68 after tuning the hyper-parameters. SHAP package is used to provide a global and local interpretation of the model predictions t…
Warsaw University of Technology（华沙理工大学）；University of Warsaw（华沙大学）；Data Juice Lab sp. z o.o.（Data Juice Lab 有限责任公司）；Polish Credit Bureau S. A. (Biuro Informacji Kredytowej S.A.)（波兰信贷局）
Rapid development of advanced modelling techniques gives an opportunity to develop tools that are more and more accurate. However as usually, everything comes with a price and in this case, the price to pay is to loose interpretability of a model while gaining on its accuracy and precision. For managers to control and effectively manage credit risk and for regulators to be convinced with model quality the price to pay is too high. In this paper, we show how to take credit scoring analytics in to the next level, namely we present comparison of various predictive models (logistic regression, log…
HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht（乌得勒支应用科学大学）；De Nederlandsche Bank（荷兰中央银行）
Explainable artificial intelligence (xAI) is seen as a solution to making AI systems less of a black box. It is essential to ensure transparency, fairness, and accountability, which are especially paramount in the financial sector. The aim of this study was a preliminary investigation of the perspectives of supervisory authorities and regulated entities regarding the application of xAI in the fi-nancial sector. Three use cases (consumer credit, credit risk, and anti-money laundering) were examined using semi-structured interviews at three banks and two supervisory authorities in the Netherland…
University of Hartford（哈特福德大学）；Tennessee Tech University（田纳西理工大学）；Edith Cowan University（伊迪丝·考恩大学）
The lack of explainability of a decision from an Artificial Intelligence (AI) based "black box" system/model, despite its superiority in many real-world applications, is a key stumbling block for adopting AI in many high stakes applications of different domain or industry. While many popular Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods or approaches are available to facilitate a human-friendly explanation of the decision, each has its own merits and demerits, with a plethora of open challenges. We demonstrate popular XAI methods with a mutual case study/task (i.e., credit default predicti…
Unifund CCR, LLC（Unifund CCR有限责任公司）；Pamplin College of Business, Virginia Polytechnic Institute（弗吉尼亚理工学院庞普林商学院）；College of Business, University of Cincinnati（辛辛那提大学商学院）
This paper proposes a two-stage scoring approach to help lenders decide their fund allocations in the peer-to-peer (P2P) lending market. The existing scoring approaches focus on only either probability of default (PD) prediction, known as credit scoring, or profitability prediction, known as profit scoring, to identify the best loans for investment. Credit scoring fails to deliver the main need of lenders on how much profit they may obtain through their investment. On the other hand, profit scoring can satisfy that need by predicting the investment profitability. However, profit scoring comple…
Class-Imbalanced-Aware Adaptive Dataset Distillation for Scalable Pretrained Model on Credit Scoring
Risk Management Division, China Development Bank（国家开发银行风险管理部）；School of Finance, Central University of Finance and Economics（中央财经大学金融学院）；GF Holdings (Hong Kong) Corporation Limited（广发控股（香港）有限公司）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）
In the peer-to-peer (P2P) lending market, lenders lend the money to the borrowers through a virtual platform and earn the possible profit generated by the interest rate. From the perspective of lenders, they want to maximize the profit while minimizing the risk. Therefore, many studies have used machine learning algorithms to help the lenders identify the "best" loans for making investments. The studies have mainly focused on two categories to guide the lenders' investments: one aims at minimizing the risk of investment (i.e., the credit scoring perspective) while the other aims at maximizing …
Assessing the Real-World Utility of Explainable AI for Arousal Diagnostics: An Application-Grounded User Study
IT-Designers Gruppe Esslingen am Neckar（埃斯林根内卡尔IT设计组）；University of Tübingen（图宾根大学）；University of Giessen（吉森大学）；Klinikum Esslingen, Klinik für Kardiologie, Pneumologie und Angilologie（埃斯林根克林克医院，心内科、呼吸科和内科）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑技术大学）
The rise of algorithmic decision-making has spawned much research on fair machine learning (ML). Financial institutions use ML for building risk scorecards that support a range of credit-related decisions. Yet, the literature on fair ML in credit scoring is scarce. The paper makes three contributions. First, we revisit statistical fairness criteria and examine their adequacy for credit scoring. Second, we catalog algorithmic options for incorporating fairness goals in the ML model development pipeline. Last, we empirically compare different fairness processors in a profit-oriented credit scori…
Credit scoring models support loan approval decisions in the financial services industry. Lenders train these models on data from previously granted credit applications, where the borrowers' repayment behavior has been observed. This approach creates sample bias. The scoring model (i.e., classifier) is trained on accepted cases only. Applying the resulting model to screen credit applications from the population of all borrowers degrades model performance. Reject inference comprises techniques to overcome sampling bias through assigning labels to rejected cases. The paper makes two contribution…
Scoring the creditworthiness of accounts that interact with decentralized financial (DeFi) protocols remains an important yet unsolved problem. In this paper, we propose a credit scoring system for those accounts that have interacted with the Aave v2 liquidity protocol. The key component of this system is a tree-based binary classifier that predicts "position delinquency." To the community, we provide our method, results, and the (abridged) dataset on which this system is built.
Credit scoring models based on accepted applications may be biased and their consequences can have a statistical and economic impact. Reject inference is the process of attempting to infer the creditworthiness status of the rejected applications. In this research, we use deep generative models to develop two new semi-supervised Bayesian models for reject inference in credit scoring, in which we model the data generating process to be dependent on a Gaussian mixture. The goal is to improve the classification accuracy in credit scoring models by adding reject applications. Our proposed models in…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；University of Strathclyde（思克莱德大学）
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have become vital to remain competitive for financial services companies around the globe. The two models currently competing for the pole position in credit risk management are deep learning (DL) and gradient boosting machines (GBM). This paper benchmarked those two algorithms in the context of credit scoring using three distinct datasets with different features to account for the reality that model choice/power is often dependent on the underlying characteristics of the dataset. The experiment has shown that GBM tends to be more powerful…
This paper presents two cases of random banking data generators based on migration matrices and scoring rules. The banking data generator is a new hope in researches of finding the proving method of comparisons of various credit scoring techniques. There is analyzed the influence of one cyclic macro--economic variable on stability in the time account and client characteristics. Data are very useful for various analyses to understand in the better way the complexity of the banking processes and also for students and their researches. There are presented very interesting conclusions for crisis b…
The paper is aware of the importance of certain figures that are essential to an understanding of Credit Scoring models in credit acceptance process optimization, namely if the power of discrimination measured by Gini value is increased by 5% then the profit of the process can be increased monthly by about 1 500 kPLN (300 kGBP, 500 kUSD, 350 kEUR). Simple business models of credit loans are also presented: acquisition - installment loan (low price) and cross-sell - cash loans (high price). Scoring models are used to optimize process, to become profitable. Various acceptance strategies with dif…
This work is attached to the BRICS 2013 competition. We propose a two-stage model for dealing with the temporal degradation of credit scoring models. This methodology produced motivating results in a 1-year horizon. We anticipate that it can be extended to other applications of risk assessment with great success. Future extensions should cover predictions in larger time frames and consider lagged periods. This methodology can be further improved if more information about the economic cycles is integrated in the forecasting of default.
University of Orléans（奥尔良大学）；Institut Universitaire de France（法国大学研究院）；HEC Paris（巴黎高等商学院）；University of Lorraine（洛林大学）；University of Nantes（南特大学）；CREST（CREST（法国国家科学研究中心等联合研究机构））；EM Lyon（里昂商学院）；Toulouse School of Economics（图卢兹经济学院）；Dauphine-PSL University（巴黎多芬大学-PSL大学）
Banks utilize credit scoring as an important indicator of financial strength and eligibility for credit. Scoring models aim to assign statistical odds or probabilities for predicting if there is a risk of nonpayment in relation to many other factors which may be involved in. This paper aims to illustrate the beneficial use of the eight machine learning (ML) methods (Support Vector Machine, Gaussian Naive Bayes, Decision Trees, Random Forest, XGBoost, K-Nearest Neighbors, Multi-layer Perceptron Neural Networks) and Logistic Regression in finding the default risk as well as the features contribu…
An Explainable Market Integrity Monitoring System with Multi-Source Attention Signals and Transparent Scoring
Department of Computer Science University of New York（纽约大学计算机科学系）；DeepMind（深度Mind）；Mila, Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学Mila）；Google Research（谷歌研究）；CIFAR Fellow
In this work we build a stack of machine learning models aimed at composing a state-of-the-art credit rating and default prediction system, obtaining excellent out-of-sample performances. Our approach is an excursion through the most recent ML / AI concepts, starting from natural language processes (NLP) applied to economic sectors' (textual) descriptions using embedding and autoencoders (AE), going through the classification of defaultable firms on the base of a wide range of economic features using gradient boosting machines (GBM) and calibrating their probabilities paying due attention to t…
One of the key elements in the banking industry rely on the appropriate selection of customers. In order to manage credit risk, banks dedicate special efforts in order to classify customers according to their risk. The usual decision making process consists in gathering personal and financial information about the borrower. Processing this information can be time consuming, and presents some difficulties due to the heterogeneous structure of data. We offer in this paper an alternative method that is able to classify customers' profiles from numerical and nominal attributes. The key feature of …
School of Engineering（工程学院）；Zurich University of Applied Sciences（苏黎世应用科技大学）；Data Science Institute（数据科学研究所）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has created the single biggest technology revolution the world has ever seen. For the finance sector, it provides great opportunities to enhance customer experience, democratize financial services, ensure consumer protection and significantly improve risk management. While it is easier than ever to run state-of-the-art machine learning models, designing and implementing systems that support real-world finance applications have been challenging. In large part because they lack transparency and explainability which are important factors in establishing reliable techn…
Application of AI in Credit Risk Scoring for Small Business Loans: A case study on how AI-based random forest model improves a Delphi model outcome in the case of Azerbaijani SMEs
Enhancing ML Models Interpretability for Credit Scoring
Dept. of Computer Science, Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学计算机科学系）；Dept. of Applied Mathematics, Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学应用数学系）；FF Quant Advisory B.V.（FF量化咨询公司）
This paper aims to present a general idea of method comparison of Credit Scoring techniques. Any scorecard can be made in various methods based on variable transformations in the logistic regression model. To make a comparison and come up with the proof that one technique is better than another is a big challenge due to the limited availability of data. The same conclusion cannot be guaranteed when using other data from another source. The following research challenge can therefore be formulated: how should the comparison be managed in order to get general results that are not biased by partic…
The University of Western Ontario（西安大略大学）；University of Basque Country（巴斯克大学）；Business Intelligence Research Center (CEINE)（商业智能研究中心（CEINE））；University of Chile（智利大学）
Credit scoring models are the primary instrument used by financial institutions to manage credit risk. The scarcity of research on behavioral scoring is due to the difficult data access. Financial institutions have to maintain the privacy and security of borrowers' information refrain them from collaborating in research initiatives. In this work, we present a methodology that allows us to evaluate the performance of models trained with synthetic data when they are applied to real-world data. Our results show that synthetic data quality is increasingly poor when the number of attributes increas…
Interpretable hybrid credit scoring for thin-file and underbanked populations
African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS)（非洲数学科学研究所）；AI Research and Innovation Nexus for Africa (AIRINA Labs)（非洲人工智能研究与创新枢纽）；Sefako Makgatho University（塞法科·马卡索大学）
Interpretable LLMs for Credit Risk: A Systematic Review and Taxonomy
School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London（伦敦大学电子工程与计算机科学学院）；Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, Boğaziçi University（博雅大学数据科学与人工智能研究所）；College of Science Computer Science Department, Kuwait University（科威特大学科学学院计算机科学系）
Credit ratings are one of the primary keys that reflect the level of riskiness and reliability of corporations to meet their financial obligations. Rating agencies tend to take extended periods of time to provide new ratings and update older ones. Therefore, credit scoring assessments using artificial intelligence has gained a lot of interest in recent years. Successful machine learning methods can provide rapid analysis of credit scores while updating older ones on a daily time scale. Related studies have shown that neural networks and support vector machines outperform other techniques by pr…
