Deep Learning Approach for Time- to-Event Modeling of Credit Risk

Sammanfattning: This thesis explores how survival analysis models performs for default risk prediction of small-to-medium sized enterprises (SME) and investigates when survival analysis models are preferable to use. This is examined by comparing the performance of three deep learning models in a survival analysis setting, a traditional survival analysis model Cox Proportional Hazards, and a traditional credit risk model logistic regression. The performance is evaluated by three metrics; concordance index, integrated Brier score and ROC-AUC. The models are trained on financial data from Swedish SME holding profit and loss statement and balance sheet results. The dataset is divided into two feature sets: a smaller and a larger, additionally the features are binned.  The results show that DeepHit and Logistic Hazard performed the best with the three metrics in mind. In terms of the AUC score all three deep learning survival models generally outperform the logistic regression model. The Cox Proportional Hazards (Cox PH) showed worse performance than the logistic regression model on the non-binned feature sets while having more comparable results in the case where the data was binned. In terms of the concordance index and integrated Brier score the Cox Proportional Hazards model consistently performed the worst out of all survival models. The largest significant performance gain for the concordance index and AUC score was however seen by the Cox PH model when binning was applied to the larger feature set. The concordance index went from 0.65 to 0.75 and the test AUC went from 76.56% to 83.91% for the larger set to larger dataset with binned features. The main conclusions is that the neural networks models did outperform the traditional models slightly and that binning had a great impact on all models, but in particular for the Cox PH model.