Predicting Credit Scores with Boosted Decision Trees

Abstract

Credit scoring models 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 machine learning techniques: the multilayer perceptron and support vector machines. The results show that boosted decision trees are a competitive technique for implementing credit scoring models.

Keywords

• forecasting
• credit scoring
• credit risk
• boosted decision trees
• machine learning