Abstract
Nowadays the correct assessment of credit risk is of particular importance for all financial institutions to ensure their stability. Thus, Basel II Accord on Banking Supervision legislates the framework for credit risk assessment. Linear scoring models have been developed for this assessment, which are functions of systematic and idiosyncratic factors. Among statistical techniques that have been applied for factor and weight selection, Neural Networks (NN) have shown superior performance as they are able to learn non linear relationships among factors and they are more efficient in the presence of noisy or incorrect data. In particular, Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) are useful when we have at hand historical series as they are able to grasp the data’s temporal dynamics. In this work, we describe an application of RNN to credit risk assessment. RNN (specifically, Elman networks) are compared with two former Neural Network systems, one with a standard feed-forward network, while the other with a special purpose architecture. The application is tested on real-world data, related to Italian small firms. We show that NN can be very successful in credit risk assessment if used jointly with a careful data analysis, pre-processing and training.
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di Tollo, G., Lyra, M. (2010). Elman Nets for Credit Risk Assessment. In: Faggini, M., Vinci, C.P. (eds) Decision Theory and Choices: a Complexity Approach. New Economic Windows. Springer, Milano. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-88-470-1778-8_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-88-470-1778-8_8
Publisher Name: Springer, Milano
Print ISBN: 978-88-470-1777-1
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