A Machine Learning Approach to Predict Default Lease Cases in Sri Lankan Financial Institutions

The economic growth of a country can be aided by a strong financial services industry. Therefore, financial companies play a vital role in today’s society. However, by providing credit facilities, they expose themselves to a significant amount of risks, since most of them lack a proper strategy to identify whether the customer is reliable and capable of paying back on time. Hence, it is widely acknowledged that having a proper strategy in place to manage and lessen the credit risks that these companies face is more beneficial, rather than relying on traditional manual techniques. This study is intended to propose a machine learning-based solution to predict possible financial lease defaults beforehand. The dataset used in this work was obtained from a leading finance company in Sri Lanka, where the data were related to leasing contracts and their equipment. According to the final results of this study, a deep learning model implemented using an Artificial Neural Network, which was compared against several other machine learning models, is the best to predict default lease cases in Sri Lankan financial institutions. The finalized model provides 93.93% of classification accuracy, 85.49% of F-measure, 87.69% of AUROC score, and 80.41% of Kappa score.