Prediction model building with clustering-launched classification and support vector machines in credit scoring

Recently, credit scoring has become a very important task as credit cards are now widely used by customers. A method that can accurately predict credit scoring is greatly needed and good prediction techniques can help to predict credit more accurately. One powerful classifier, the support vector machine (SVM), was successfully applied to a wide range of domains. In recent years, researchers have applied the SVM-based in the prediction of credit scoring, and the results have been shown it to be effective. In this study, two real world credit datasets in the University of California Irvine Machine Learning Repository were selected. SVM and a new classifier, clustering-launched classification (CLC), were employed to predict the accuracy of credit scoring. The advantages of using CLC are that it can classify data efficiently and only need one parameter needs to be decided. In substance, the results show that CLC is better than SVM. Therefore, CLC is an effective tool to predict credit scoring.     

Credit scoring using support vector machines with direct search for parameters selection

Support vector machines (SVM) is an effective tool for building good credit scoring models. However, the performance of the model depends on its parameters’ setting. In this study, we use direct search method to optimize the SVM-based credit scoring model and compare it with other three parameters optimization methods, such as grid search, method based on design of experiment (DOE) and genetic algorithm (GA). Two real-world credit datasets are selected to demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the method. The results show that the direct search method can find the effective model with high classification accuracy and good robustness and keep less dependency on the initial search space or point setting.     

Least squares twin support vector machines for pattern classification

In this paper we formulate a least squares version of the recently proposed twin support vector machine (TSVM) for binary classification. This formulation leads to extremely simple and fast algorithm for generating binary classifiers based on two non-parallel hyperplanes. Here we attempt to solve two modified primal problems of TSVM, instead of two dual problems usually solved. We show that the solution of the two modified primal problems reduces to solving just two systems of linear equations as opposed to solving two quadratic programming problems along with two systems of linear equations in TSVM. Classification using nonlinear kernel also leads to systems of linear equations. Our experiments on publicly available datasets indicate that the proposed least squares TSVM has comparable classification accuracy to that of TSVM but with considerably lesser computational time. Since linear least squares TSVM can easily handle large datasets, we further went on to investigate its efficiency for text categorization applications. Computational results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method over linear proximal SVM on all the text corpuses considered.     

An ensemble of support vector machines for predicting virulent proteins

It is important to develop a reliable system for predicting bacterial virulent proteins for finding novel drug/vaccine and for understanding virulence mechanisms in pathogens.In this work we have proposed a bacterial virulent protein prediction method based on an ensemble of classifiers where the features are extracted directly from the amino acid sequence of a given protein. It is well known in the literature that the features extracted from the evolutionary information of a given protein are better than the features extracted from the amino acid sequence. Our method tries to fill the gap between the amino acid sequence based approaches and the evolutionary information based approaches.An extensive evaluation according to a blind testing protocol, where the parameters of the system are calculated using the training set and the system is validated in three different independent datasets, has demonstrated the validity of the proposed method.     

The evaluation of consumer loans using support vector machines

The commencement of the Basel II requirement, popularization of consumer loans and the intense competition in financial market has increased the awareness of the critical delinquency issue for financial institutions in granting loans to potential applicants. In the past few decades, the scheme of artificial neural networks has been successfully applied to the financial field. Recently, the Support Vector Machine (SVM) has emerged as the better neural network in dealing with classification and forecasting problems due to its superior features of generalization performance and global optimum. This study develops a loan evaluation model using SVM to identify potential applicants for consumer loans. In addition to conducting experiments on performance comparison via cross-validation and paired t test, we analyze misclassification errors in terms of Type I and Type II and their effect on selecting network parameters of SVM. The analysis findings facilitate the development of a useful visual decision-support tool. The experimental results using a real-world data set reveal that SVM surpasses traditional neural network models in generalization performance and visualization via the visual tool, which helps decision makers determine appropriate loan evaluation strategies.     

Knowledge based Least Squares Twin support vector machines

We propose knowledge based versions of a relatively new family of SVM algorithms based on two non-parallel hyperplanes. Specifically, we consider prior knowledge in the form of multiple polyhedral sets and incorporate the same into the formulation of linear Twin SVM (TWSVM)/Least Squares Twin SVM (LSTWSVM) and term them as knowledge based TWSVM (KBTWSVM)/knowledge based LSTWSVM (KBLSTWSVM). Both of these formulations are capable of generating non-parallel hyperplanes based on real-world data and prior knowledge. We derive the solution of KBLSTWSVM and use it in our computational experiments for comparison against other linear knowledge based SVM formulations. Our experiments show that KBLSTWSVM is a versatile classifier whose solution is extremely simple when compared with other linear knowledge based SVM algorithms.     

Mining the customer credit using hybrid support vector machine technique

Credit scoring has become a critical and challenging management science issue, as the credit industry has been facing fiercer competition in recent years. Many methods have been suggested to tackle this problem in the literature. In this paper, we proposed hybrid support vector machine technique based on three strategies: (1) using CART to select input features, (2) using MARS to select input features, (3) using grid search to optimize model parameters. In order to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed hybrid SVM model, one credit card dataset provided by a local bank in China is used in this study. Analytic results demonstrate that the hybrid SVM technique not only has the best classification rate, but also has the lowest Type II error in comparison with CART, MARS and SVM and justify the presumptions that SVM having better capability of capturing nonlinear relationship among variables.     

Credit scoring with a data mining approach based on support vector machines

The credit card industry has been growing rapidly recently, and thus huge numbers of consumers’ credit data are collected by the credit department of the bank. The credit scoring manager often evaluates the consumer’s credit with intuitive experience. However, with the support of the credit classification model, the manager can accurately evaluate the applicant’s credit score. Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification is currently an active research area and successfully solves classification problems in many domains. This study used three strategies to construct the hybrid SVM-based credit scoring models to evaluate the applicant’s credit score from the applicant’s input features. Two credit datasets in UCI database are selected as the experimental data to demonstrate the accuracy of the SVM classifier. Compared with neural networks, genetic programming, and decision tree classifiers, the SVM classifier achieved an identical classificatory accuracy with relatively few input features. Additionally, combining genetic algorithms with SVM classifier, the proposed hybrid GA-SVM strategy can simultaneously perform feature selection task and model parameters optimization. Experimental results show that SVM is a promising addition to the existing data mining methods.     

A data driven ensemble classifier for credit scoring analysis

This study focuses on predicting whether a credit applicant can be categorized as good, bad or borderline from information initially supplied. This is essentially a classification task for credit scoring. Given its importance, many researchers have recently worked on an ensemble of classifiers. However, to the best of our knowledge, unrepresentative samples drastically reduce the accuracy of the deployment classifier. Few have attempted to preprocess the input samples into more homogeneous cluster groups and then fit the ensemble classifier accordingly. For this reason, we introduce the concept of class-wise classification as a preprocessing step in order to obtain an efficient ensemble classifier. This strategy would work better than a direct ensemble of classifiers without the preprocessing step. The proposed ensemble classifier is constructed by incorporating several data mining techniques, mainly involving optimal associate binning to discretize continuous values; neural network, support vector machine, and Bayesian network are used to augment the ensemble classifier. In particular, the Markov blanket concept of Bayesian network allows for a natural form of feature selection, which provides a basis for mining association rules. The learned knowledge is represented in multiple forms, including causal diagram and constrained association rules. The data driven nature of the proposed system distinguishes it from existing hybrid/ensemble credit scoring systems.     

New hybrid data mining model for credit scoring based on feature selection algorithm and ensemble classifiers

The aim of this paper is to propose a new hybrid data mining model based on combination of various feature selection and ensemble learning classification algorithms, in order to support decision making process. The model is built through several stages. In the first stage, initial dataset is preprocessed and apart of applying different preprocessing techniques, we paid a great attention to the feature selection. Five different feature selection algorithms were applied and their results, based on ROC and accuracy measures of logistic regression algorithm, were combined based on different voting types. We also proposed a new voting method, called if_any, that outperformed all other voting methods, as well as a single feature selection algorithm's results. In the next stage, a four different classification algorithms, including generalized linear model, support vector machine, naive Bayes and decision tree, were performed based on dataset obtained in the feature selection process. These classifiers were combined in eight different ensemble models using soft voting method. Using the real dataset, the experimental results show that hybrid model that is based on features selected by if_any voting method and ensemble GLM + DT model performs the highest performance and outperforms all other ensemble and single classifier models.     

A novel excitation controller using support vector machines and approximate models

This paper proposes a novel excitation controller using support vector machines （SVM） and approximate models. The nonlinear control law is derived directly based on an input-output approximation method via Taylor expansion, which not only avoids complex control development and intensive computation, but also avoids online learning or adjustment. Only a general SVM modelling technique is involved in both model identification and controller implementation. The robustness of the stability is rigorously established using the Lyapunov method. Several simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed excitation controller.     

Computational time reduction for credit scoring: An integrated approach based on support vector machine and stratified sampling method

With the rapid growth of credit industry, credit scoring model has a great significance to issue a credit card to the applicant with a minimum risk. So credit scoring is very important in financial firm like bans etc. With the previous data, a model is established. From that model is decision is taken whether he will be granted for issuing loans, credit cards or he will be rejected. There are several methodologies to construct credit scoring model i.e. neural network model, statistical classification techniques, genetic programming, support vector model etc. Computational time for running a model has a great importance in the 21st century. The algorithms or models with less computational time are more efficient and thus gives more profit to the banks or firms. In this study, we proposed a new strategy to reduce the computational time for credit scoring. In this approach we have used SVM incorporated with the concept of reduction of features using F score and taking a sample instead of taking the whole dataset to create the credit scoring model. We run our method two real dataset to see the performance of the new method. We have compared the result of the new method with the result obtained from other well known method. It is shown that new method for credit scoring model is very much competitive to other method in the view of its accuracy as well as new method has a less computational time than the other methods.     

Decision confidence-based multi-level support vector machines

Support vector machines (SVM) have been showing high accuracy of prediction in many applications. However, as any statistical learning algorithm, SVM's accuracy drops if some of the training points are contaminated by an unknown source of noise. The choice of clean training points is critical to avoid the overfitting problem which occurs generally when the model is excessively complex, which is reflected by a high accuracy over the training set and a low accuracy over the testing set (unseen points). In this paper we present a new multi-level SVM architecture that splits the training set into points that are labeled as ‘easily classifiable’ which do not cause an increase in the model complexity and ‘non-easily classifiable’ which are responsible for increasing the complexity. This method is used to create an SVM architecture that yields on average a higher accuracy than a traditional soft margin SVM trained with the same training set. The architecture is tested on the well known US postal handwritten digit recognition problem, the Wisconsin breast cancer dataset and on the agitation detection dataset. The results show an increase in the overall accuracy for the three datasets. Throughout this paper the word confidence is used to denote the confidence over the decision as commonly used in the literature.     

支持向量机和最小二乘支持向量机的比较及应用研究

介绍和比较了支持向量机分类器和量小二乘支持向量机分类器的算法。并将支持向量机分类器和量小二乘支持向量机分类器应用于心脏病诊断，取得了较高的准确率。所用数据来自UCI bench—mark数据集。实验结果表明，支持向量机和量小二乘支持向量机在医疗诊断中有很大的应用潜力。     

Fuzzy functions with support vector machines

A new fuzzy system modeling (FSM) approach that identifies the fuzzy functions using support vector machines (SVM) is proposed. This new approach is structurally different from the fuzzy rule base approaches and fuzzy regression methods. It is a new alternate version of the earlier FSM with fuzzy functions approaches. SVM is applied to determine the support vectors for each fuzzy cluster obtained by fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering algorithm. Original input variables, the membership values obtained from the FCM together with their transformations form a new augmented set of input variables. The performance of the proposed system modeling approach is compared to previous fuzzy functions approaches, standard SVM, LSE methods using an artificial sparse dataset and a real-life non-sparse dataset. The results indicate that the proposed fuzzy functions with support vector machines approach is a feasible and stable method for regression problems and results in higher performances than the classical statistical methods.     

Possibilistic support vector machines

We propose new support vector machines (SVMs) that incorporate the geometric distribution of an input data set by associating each data point with a possibilistic membership, which measures the relative strength of the self class membership. By using a possibilistic distance measure based on the possibilistic membership, we reformulate conventional SVMs in three ways. The proposed methods are shown to have better classification performance than conventional SVMs in various tests.     

Prediction performance of support vector machines on input vector normalization methods

Support vector machines (SVM) based on the statistical learning theory is currently one of the most popular and efficient approaches for pattern recognition problem, because of their remarkable performance in terms of prediction accuracy. It is, however, required to choose a proper normalization method for input vectors in order to improve the system performance. Various normalization methods for SVMs have been studied in this research and the results showed that the normalization methods could affect the prediction performance. The results could be useful for determining a proper normalization method to achieve the best performance in SVMs.     

Combining meta-learning and search techniques to select parameters for support vector machines

Support Vector Machines (SVMs) have achieved very good performance on different learning problems. However, the success of SVMs depends on the adequate choice of the values of a number of parameters (e.g., the kernel and regularization parameters). In the current work, we propose the combination of meta-learning and search algorithms to deal with the problem of SVM parameter selection. In this combination, given a new problem to be solved, meta-learning is employed to recommend SVM parameter values based on parameter configurations that have been successfully adopted in previous similar problems. The parameter values returned by meta-learning are then used as initial search points by a search technique, which will further explore the parameter space. In this proposal, we envisioned that the initial solutions provided by meta-learning are located in good regions of the search space (i.e. they are closer to optimum solutions). Hence, the search algorithm would need to evaluate a lower number of candidate solutions when looking for an adequate solution. In this work, we investigate the combination of meta-learning with two search algorithms: Particle Swarm Optimization and Tabu Search. The implemented hybrid algorithms were used to select the values of two SVM parameters in the regression domain. These combinations were compared with the use of the search algorithms without meta-learning. The experimental results on a set of 40 regression problems showed that, on average, the proposed hybrid methods obtained lower error rates when compared to their components applied in isolation.     

On-line independent support vector machines

Support vector machines (SVMs) are one of the most successful algorithms for classification. However, due to their space and time requirements, they are not suitable for on-line learning, that is, when presented with an endless stream of training observations.In this paper we propose a new on-line algorithm, called on-line independent support vector machines (OISVMs), which approximately converges to the standard SVM solution each time new observations are added; the approximation is controlled via a user-defined parameter. The method employs a set of linearly independent observations and tries to project every new observation onto the set obtained so far, dramatically reducing time and space requirements at the price of a negligible loss in accuracy. As opposed to similar algorithms, the size of the solution obtained by OISVMs is always bounded, implying a bounded testing time. These statements are supported by extensive experiments on standard benchmark databases as well as on two real-world applications, namely place recognition by a mobile robot in an indoor environment and human grasping posture classification.     

Texture classification using the support vector machines

In recent years, support vector machines (SVMs) have demonstrated excellent performance in a variety of pattern recognition problems. In this paper, we apply SVMs for texture classification, using translation-invariant features generated from the discrete wavelet frame transform. To alleviate the problem of selecting the right kernel parameter in the SVM, we use a fusion scheme based on multiple SVMs, each with a different setting of the kernel parameter. Compared to the traditional Bayes classifier and the learning vector quantization algorithm, SVMs, and, in particular, the fused output from multiple SVMs, produce more accurate classification results on the Brodatz texture album.