This paper presents a meta-learning framework for credit risk assessment of Italian Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) that explicitly addresses the temporal misalignment of credit scoring models.
The approach aligns financial statement reference dates with evaluation dates, mitigating bias arising from publication delays and asynchronous data sources. It is based on a two-step temporal decomposition that at first estimates annual probabilities of default (PDs) anchored to balance-sheet reference dates (December 31st) through a static model. Then it models the monthly evolution of PDs using higher-frequency behavioral data. Finally, we employ stacking-based architecture to aggregate multiple scoring systems, each capturing complementary aspects of default risk, into a unified predictive model. In this way, first level model outputs are treated as learned representations that encode non-linear relationships in financial and behavioral indicators, allowing integration of new expert-based features without retraining base models. This design provides a coherent and interpretable solution to challenges typical of low-default environments, including heterogeneous default definitions and reporting delays. Empirical validation shows that the framework effectively captures credit risk evolution over time, improving temporal consistency and predictive stability relative to standard ensemble methods.
CREST-ENSAI；LARODEC-ISG；ESSEC, Université de Tunis（突尼斯大学ESSEC）
The credit scoring risk management is a fast growing field due to consumer's credit requests. Credit requests, of new and existing customers, are often evaluated by classical discrimination rules based on customers information. However, these kinds of strategies have serious limits and don't take into account the characteristics difference between current customers and the future ones. The aim of this paper is to measure credit worthiness for non customers borrowers and to model potential risk given a heterogeneous population formed by borrowers customers of the bank and others who are not. We…
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 …
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…
Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of Malta（马耳他大学人工智能系）
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 Regulati…
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.
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…
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…
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…
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）
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）
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…
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…
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…
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 …
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）
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）
Since the 1990s, there have been significant advances in the technology space and the e-Commerce area, leading to an exponential increase in demand for cashless payment solutions. This has led to increased demand for credit cards, bringing along with it the possibility of higher credit defaults and hence higher delinquency rates, over a period of time. The purpose of this research paper is to build a contemporary credit scoring model to forecast credit defaults for unsecured lending (credit cards), by employing machine learning techniques. As much of the customer payments data available to len…
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）
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…
This research investigated the potential for improving Peer-to-Peer (P2P) credit scoring by using "private information" about communications and travels of borrowers. We found that P2P borrowers' ego networks exhibit scale-free behavior driven by underlying preferential attachment mechanisms that connect borrowers in a fashion that can be used to predict loan profitability. The projection of these private networks onto networks of mobile phone communication and geographical locations from mobile phone GPS potentially give loan providers access to private information through graph and location …
