Open Access

Michael Bücker, Gero Szepannek, Przemyslaw Biecek, Alicja Gosiewska, Mateusz Staniak

• A major requirement for Credit Scoring models is of course to provide a risk prediction that is as accurate as possible. In addition, regulators demand these models to be transparent and auditable. Thus, in Credit Scoring very simple Predictive Models such as Logistic Regression or Decision Trees are still widely used and the superior predictive power of modern Machine Learning algorithms cannot be fully leveraged. A lot of potential is therefore missed, leading to higher reserves or more credit defaults. This talk presents an overview of techniques that are able to make “black box” machine learning models transparent and demonstrate how they can be applied in Credit Scoring. We use the DALEX set of tools to compare a traditional scoring approach with state of the art Machine Learning models and asses both approaches in terms of interpretability and predictive power. Results show that a comparable degree of interpretability can be achieved while machine learning techniques keep their ability to improve predictive power.