Skip to main content

Interpretable Weighted Soft Decision Forest for Credit Scoring

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
  • 639 Accesses

Part of the book series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ((AISC,volume 1142))

Abstract

Deep neural network (DNN) has been widely applied in image recognition, sentiment analysis, natural language processing, and other fields. Because of its excellent classification capacity, many researchers have used it for credit scoring problems. However, compared to the traditional machine learning methods, DNN is often referred to as ‘black box’ because of the lack of interpretability. In this paper, a weighted soft decision forest (WSDF) model is proposed for credit scoring problem. WSDF tries to simulate the credit scoring mechanism under multiple expert decisions. In the new model, multiple soft decision trees are ensembled by an interpretable weighting mechanism to form a forest. The new weighting mechanism also uses a soft decision tree structure function to calculate the weight for each tree’s output. We test the performance of the new model on German Credit dataset. Compared with baseline algorithms, WSDF has good classification performance and interpretability.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   129.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   169.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Sun J, Li H, Huang QH, He KY (2014) Predicting financial distress and corporate failure: a review from the state-of-the-art definitions, modeling, sampling, and featuring approaches. Knowl-Based Syst 57(2):41–56

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Koh PW, Liang P (2017) Understanding black-box predictions via influence functions. arXiv preprint arXiv:1703.04730

    Google Scholar 

  3. Tong ENC, Mues C, Thomas LC (2012) Mixture cure models in credit scoring: if and when borrowers default. Eur J Oper Res 218(1):132–139

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  4. Abellán J, Mantas CJ (2014) Improving experimental studies about ensembles of classifiers for bankruptcy prediction and credit scoring. Expert Syst Appl 41(8):3825–3830

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Finlay S (2011) Multiple classifier architectures and their application to credit risk assessment. Eur J Oper Res 210(2):368–378

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Ribeiro MT, Singh S, Guestrin C (2016) “Why Should I Trust You?”: explaining the predictions of any classifier. In: Acm sigkdd International conference on knowledge discovery and data mining (KDD) 2016, pp 1135–1144

    Google Scholar 

  7. Frosst N, Hinton G (2017) Distilling a neural network into a soft decision tree. arXiv:1711.09784

    Google Scholar 

  8. Hinton G, Dean J, Vinyals O et al (2014) Distilling the knowledge in a neural network. In: Deep learning and representation learning workshop at NIPS 2014, NIPS. Palais des Congrès de Montréal, Montréal, Canada, pp 1–9

    Google Scholar 

  9. Friedman JH (2001) Greedy function approximation: a gradient boosting machine. Ann Stat 29(5):1189–1232

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  10. Zhao Z, Xu S, Kang BH, Kabir MMJ, Liu Y, Wasinger R (2015) Investigation and improvement of multi-layer perceptron neural networks for credit scoring. Expert Syst Appl 42(7):3508–3516

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Dua D, Karra Taniskidou E (2017) UCI machine learning repository [https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml]. University of California, School of Information and Computer Science, Irvine, CA

Download references

Acknowledgements

This research is partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61562041).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yanwen Qu .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2020 Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Zhang, Z., Liu, X., Gao, Z., Qu, Y. (2020). Interpretable Weighted Soft Decision Forest for Credit Scoring. In: Wang, TS., Ip, A., Tavana, M., Jain, V. (eds) Recent Trends in Decision Science and Management. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1142. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3588-8_11

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics