Artificial neural networks (ANNs) have been extensively used for classification problems in many areas such as gene, text and image recognition. Although ANNs are popular also to estimate the probability of default in credit risk, they have drawbacks; a major one is their tendency to overfit the data. Here we propose an improved Bayesian regularization approach to train ANNs and compare it to the classical regularization that relies on the back-propagation algorithm for training feedforward networks. We investigate different network architectures and test the classification accuracy on three data sets. Profitability, leverage and liquidity emerge as important financial default driver categories.
Support vector machines (SVM) have been extensively used for classification problems in many areas such as gene, text and image recognition. However, SVM have been rarely used to estimate the probability of default (PD) in credit risk. In this paper, we advocate the application of SVM, rather than the popular logistic regression (LR) method, for the estimation of both corporate and retail PD. Our results indicate that most of the time SVM outperforms LR in terms of classification accuracy for the corporate and retail segments. We propose a new wrapper feature selection based on maximizing the distance of the support vectors from the separating hyperplane and apply it to identify the main PD drivers. We used three datasets to test the PD estimation, containing (1) retail obligors from Germany, (2) corporate obligors from Eastern Europe, and (3) corporate obligors from Poland. Total assets, total liabilities, and sales are identified as frequent default drivers for the corporate datasets, whereas current account status and duration of the current account are frequent default drivers for the retail dataset.
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