Machine Learning for Enhanced Credit Risk Assessment: An Empirical Approach

Abstract

Financial institutions and regulators increasingly rely on large-scale data analysis, particularly machine learning, for credit decisions. This paper assesses ten machine learning algorithms using a dataset of over 2.5 million observations from a financial institution. We also summarize key statistical and machine learning models in credit scoring and review current research findings. Our results indicate that ensemble models, particularly XGBoost, outperform traditional algorithms such as logistic regression in credit classification. Researchers and experts in the subject of credit risk can use this work as a practical reference as it covers crucial phases of data processing, exploratory data analysis, modeling, and evaluation metrics.