Loan Default Prediction using Supervised Machine Learning Algorithms

Sammanfattning: It is essential for a bank to estimate the credit risk it carries and the magnitude of exposure it has in case of non-performing customers. Estimation of this kind of risk has been done by statistical methods through decades and with respect to recent development in the field of machine learning, there has been an interest in investigating if machine learning techniques can perform better quantification of the risk. The aim of this thesis is to examine which method from a chosen set of machine learning techniques exhibits the best performance in default prediction with regards to chosen model evaluation parameters. The investigated techniques were Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Decision Tree, AdaBoost, XGBoost, Artificial Neural Network and Support Vector Machine. An oversampling technique called SMOTE was implemented in order to treat the imbalance between classes for the response variable. The results showed that XGBoost without implementation of SMOTE obtained the best result with respect to the chosen model evaluation metric.