Optimizing Loan Approval Decisions: Harnessing Ensemble Learning for Credit Scoring

When assessing an applicant’s creditworthiness, credit scoring plays a crucial role in managing credit risk for financial institutions and aiding in loan acceptance choices. Using ensemble learning algorithms, this study offers a thorough review of credit rating for loan approval. The research uses a range of datasets with financial, demographic, and past credit information about loan applicants to build and evaluate ensemble credit scoring models. This study investigates feature selection techniques, ensemble parameter manipulation, and model interpretability to enhance credit scoring. The results demonstrate how ensemble learning algorithms provide more accurate credit risk assessments and perform better in credit scoring than individual classifiers.Random Forest and XGBoost are essential for improving credit risk assessment accuracy when applying ensemble learning algorithms for credit scoring research. Preprocessing is done on datasets that include financial, demographic, and past credit information. This includes encoding category features and addressing missing values. An ensemble of decision trees is generated by means of the Random Forest method, which is well-known for its capacity to represent intricate relationships. Concurrently, XGBoost—a potent gradient boosting algorithm—is integrated to identify complex patterns in the data. Grid search is used to optimize the hyperparameters for both models, and feature selection techniques such utilizing SHAP values for XGBoost and evaluating the significance of a feature from Random Forest help to make the models more interpretable. In order to give precise credit risk evaluations, the ensemble model integrates predictions from Random Forest and XGBoost, utilizing the advantages of each approach.