Credit Risk Assessment Using Learning Algorithms for Feature Selection

Abstract

Firefly algorithm is one of the latest outstanding bio-inspired algorithms, which could be manipulated in solving continuous or discrete optimisation problems. In this context, we have utilised the firefly algorithm accompanied by five well-known models of feature selection classifiers to have an accurate estimation of risk, and further to improve the interpret-ability of credit card prediction. One of the significant challenges in the real-world datasets is how to select features. As most of the datasets are unbalanced, the selection of features turns to the maximum class of data that is not fair. To overcome this issue, we have balanced the data using the SMOTE method. Our experimental results on four datasets show that balancing data has increased accuracy. In addition, using a hybrid firefly algorithm, the optimal combination of features that predicts the target class label is achieved. The selected features by the proposed method besides been reduced can represent both majority and minority classes. © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.