The majority of current credit-scoring models, used for loan approval processing, are generally built on the basis of the information from the accepted credit applicants whose ability to repay the loan is known. This situation generates what is called the selection bias, presented by a sample that is not representative of the population of applicants, since rejected applications are excluded. Thus, the impact on the eligibility of those models from a statistical and economic point of view. Especially for the models used in the peer-to-peer lending platforms, since their rejection rate is extremely high. The method of inferring rejected applicants information in the process of construction of the credit scoring models is known as reject inference. This study proposes a semi-supervised learning framework based on hidden Markov models (SSHMM), as a novel method of reject inference. Real data from the Lending Club platform, the most used online lending marketplace in the United States as well as the rest of the world, is used to experiment the effectiveness of our method over existing approaches. The results of this study clearly illustrate the proposed method’s superiority, stability, and adaptability.
Hidden Markov Models (HMM) are used in a wide range of artifificial intelligence applications including speech recognition, computer vision, computational biology and fifinance. Estimating an HMM parameters is often addressed via the Baum-Welch algorithm (BWA), but this algorithm tends to convergence to local optimum of the model parameters. Therefore, optimizing HMM parameters remains a crucial and challenging work. In this paper, a Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) combined with Baum-Welch algorithm (VNS-BWA) is proposed. The idea is to use VNS to escape from local minima, enable greater exploration of the search space, and enhance the learning capability of HMMs models. The proposed algorithm has entire advantage of combination of the search mechanism in VNS algorithm for training with no gradient information, and the BWA algorithm that utilizes this kind of knowledge. The performance of the proposed method is validated on a real dataset. The results show that the VNS-BWA has better performance fifinding the optimal parameters of HMM models, enhancing its learning capability and classifification performance.
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