Credit scoring with boosted decision trees

Bastos, Joao (2007): Credit scoring with boosted decision trees. Forthcoming in:

Abstract

The enormous growth experienced by the credit industry has led researchers to develop sophisticated credit scoring models that help lenders decide whether to grant or reject credit to applicants. This paper proposes a credit scoring model based on boosted decision trees, a powerful learning technique that aggregates several decision trees to form a classifier given by a weighted majority vote of classifications predicted by individual decision trees. The performance of boosted decision trees is evaluated using two publicly available credit card application datasets. The prediction accuracy of boosted decision trees is benchmarked against two alternative data mining techniques: the multilayer perceptron and support vector machines. The results show that boosted decision trees are a competitive technique for implementing credit scoring models.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: Credit scoring; Boosting; Decision tree; neural network; support vector machine
• Subjects: C - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods > C4 - Econometric and Statistical Methods: Special Topics > C44 - Operations Research ; Statistical Decision Theory; G - Financial Economics > G3 - Corporate Finance and Governance > G32 - Financing Policy ; Financial Risk and Risk Management ; Capital and Ownership Structure ; Value of Firms ; Goodwill