An application of machine learning in the domain of loan analysis

Abstract

Making decisions on whether to give or not a financial support to an industrial project is a very common and yet very complex task. Financial institutions need much expertise to deal with the large amount of information that has to be considered for this process. An expert system based approach seems to be an interesting solution to the problems raised by this type of application. Knowledge acquisition is, however, a very time consuming task. We have used APT, a multistrategy learning system, as a knowledge elicitation tool in the domain of loan decision. We describe the process of building and refining a knowledge base and compare the results of our approach to a conventional expert system.