Machine Learning Enabled Early Warning System For Financial Distress Using Real-Time Digital Signals

TL;DR

This paper presents a machine learning-based early warning system that leverages real-time digital and macroeconomic signals to predict household financial distress with high accuracy, aiming to enable timely interventions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework combining digital economy measures and macroeconomic indicators with advanced machine learning models for real-time financial distress prediction.

Findings

Engineered features from digital signals improve prediction accuracy.

Ensemble models outperform baseline classifiers in detecting distress.

Key predictors include inflation volatility and ICT demand.

Abstract

The growing instability of both global and domestic economic environments has increased the risk of financial distress at the household level. However, traditional econometric models often rely on delayed and aggregated data, limiting their effectiveness. This study introduces a machine learning-based early warning system that utilizes real-time digital and macroeconomic signals to identify financial distress in near real-time. Using a panel dataset of 750 households tracked over three monitoring rounds spanning 13 months, the framework combines socioeconomic attributes, macroeconomic indicators (such as GDP growth, inflation, and foreign exchange fluctuations), and digital economy measures (including ICT demand and market volatility). Through data preprocessing and feature engineering, we introduce lagged variables, volatility measures, and interaction terms to capture both gradual and sudden changes in financial stability. We benchmark baseline classifiers, such as logistic regression and decision trees, against advanced ensemble models including random forests, XGBoost, and LightGBM. Our results indicate that the engineered features from the digital economy significantly enhance predictive accuracy. The system performs reliably for both binary distress detection and multi-class severity classification, with SHAP-based explanations identifying inflation volatility and ICT demand as key predictors. Crucially, the framework is designed for scalable deployment in national agencies and low-bandwidth regional offices, ensuring it is accessible for policymakers and practitioners. By implementing machine learning in a transparent and interpretable manner, this study demonstrates the feasibility and impact of providing near-real-time early warnings of financial distress. This offers actionable insights that can strengthen household resilience and guide preemptive intervention strategies.