Wide and Deep Learning for Peer-to-Peer Lending
This work addresses a domain-specific problem for lenders in peer-to-peer lending by improving investment decision-making, though it is incremental as it builds on existing scoring methods.
The paper tackles the problem of fund allocation in peer-to-peer lending by proposing a two-stage scoring approach that integrates credit scoring and profit scoring to address limitations in existing methods, resulting in outperformance over those approaches as verified by numerical studies on real-world data.
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.