A Hybrid Extreme Gradient Boosting Model for Credit Risk Modelling in the Presence of Inflation

Abstract

The recent developments in the credit and banking industry brought by technology has led to increased competition and the rise of risks and challenges. Credit scoring is one of the core items that keeps this industry competitive and profitable. The creation of credit score models to assess the ability of the loan applicant to repay his or her loan remains an active field of research. Practically, the existing models ignore the factor of inflation in determining the credit score of a loan applicant. Inflation affect the performance of the financing institution negatively because it makes some of the borrowers struggle to repay the loan and so leading to some bad debts that might end up being written off. By integrating the inflation factor to the Extreme gradient boosting algorithm led to improved accuracy of the model. In this paper, a new model that uses the inflation rate of a specific region or country in the regularization term of the extreme gradient boosting model has been developed. The evaluation of the model is by comparison with the other common models using ROC, Accuracy, precision and recall. The developed model emerge the second best in terms of performance but better than the standard extreme gradient boosting model.