An artificial immune classifier for credit scoring analysis

The primary concern of the rating policies for a banking industry is to develop a more objective, accurate and competitive scoring model to avoid losses from potential bad debt. This study proposes an artificial immune classifier based on the artificial immune network (named AINE-based classifier) to evaluate the applicants’ credit scores. Two experimental credit datasets are used to show the accuracy rate of the artificial immune classifier. The ten-fold cross-validation method is applied to evaluate the performance of the classifier. The classifier is compared with other data mining techniques. Experimental results show that for the AINE-based classifier in credit scoring is more competitive than the SVM and hybrid SVMbased classifiers, except the BPN classifier. We further compare our classifier with other three AIS-based classifiers in the benchmark datasets, and show that the AINE-based classifier can rival the AIRS-based classifiers and outperforms the SAIS classifier when the number of attributes and classes increase. Our classifier can provide the credit card issuer with accurate and valuable information of credit scoring analyses to avoid making incorrect decisions that result in the loss of applicants’ bad debt. © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.