Wide and Deep Learning for Peer-to-Peer Lending

TL;DR

This paper introduces a two-stage wide and deep learning approach combining credit and profit scoring to improve loan selection in P2P lending, effectively addressing class imbalance and enhancing prediction accuracy.

Contribution

It proposes an integrated two-stage scoring method using wide and deep learning to simultaneously predict default risk and profitability in P2P lending.

Findings

Outperforms existing credit and profit scoring methods.

Effectively handles class imbalance in loan data.

Improves prediction accuracy for loan profitability.

Abstract

This paper proposes a two-stage scoring approach to help lenders decide their fund allocations in the peer-to-peer (P2P) lending market. The existing scoring approaches focus on only either probability of default (PD) prediction, known as credit scoring, or profitability prediction, known as profit scoring, to identify the best loans for investment. Credit scoring fails to deliver the main need of lenders on how much profit they may obtain through their investment. On the other hand, profit scoring can satisfy that need by predicting the investment profitability. However, profit scoring completely ignores the class imbalance problem where most of the past loans are non-default. Consequently, ignorance of the class imbalance problem significantly affects the accuracy of profitability prediction. Our proposed two-stage scoring approach is an integration of credit scoring and profit scoring to address the above challenges. More specifically, stage 1 is designed as credit scoring to identify non-default loans while the imbalanced nature of loan status is considered in PD prediction. The loans identified as non-default are then moved to stage 2 for prediction of profitability, measured by internal rate of return. Wide and deep learning is used to build the predictive models in both stages to achieve both memorization and generalization. Extensive numerical studies are conducted based on real-world data to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The numerical studies indicate our two-stage scoring approach outperforms the existing credit scoring and profit scoring approaches.