Temporally- Adaptive linear classification for handling population drift in credit scoring

Abstract

Classification methods have proven effective for predicting the creditworthiness of credit applications. However, the tendency of the underlying populations to change over time, population drift, is a fundamental problem for such classifiers. The problem manifests as decreasing performance as the classifier ages and is typically handled by periodic classifier reconstruction. To maintain performance between rebuilds, we propose an adaptive and incremental linear classification rule that is updated on the arrival of new labeled data. We consider adapting this method to suit credit application classification and demonstrate, with real loan data, that the method outperforms static and periodically rebuilt linear classifiers. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.