A hybrid neural network approach for credit scoring

The development of an effective credit scoring model has become a very important issue as the credit industry is confronted with ever‐intensifying competition and aggravating bad debt problems. During the past few years, a substantial number of studies in the field of statistics have been conducted to improve the accuracy of credit scoring models. In order to refine the classification and decrease misclassification, this paper presents a two‐stage model. Focusing on classification, the first stage aims at constructing an artificial neural network (ANN)‐based credit scoring model to categorize applicants into the group of accepted (good) credit and the group of rejected (bad) credit. Switching from classification to reassignment, the second stage proceeds to reduce the Type I error by retrieving the originally rejected good credit applicants to conditional acceptance using the Case‐Based Reasoning (CBR) classification technique. The proposed model (RST–ANN–CBR) is applied to a credit card dataset to verify its effectiveness. As the results indicate, the proposed model is able to achieve more accurate credit scoring than four other methods; more importantly, it is validated to recover potentially lost customers and to increase business revenues.