Hyperparameters tuning of random forest with harmony search in credit scoring

Correct identification of defaulters and non-defaulters in the lending industry is a crucial task for financial institutions. Credit scoring is a tool utilized for credit granting decisions. Recently, Random Forest (RF) is actively researched in credit scoring due to two main benefits, i.e. non-parametric flexibility to account for various data patterns with good classification ability and the computed features importance that can explain the attributes. Hyperparameters tuning is a necessary procedure to ensure good performance of a RF. This paper proposes the use of a metaheuristic, Harmony Search (HS), to form a hybrid HS-RF to conduct hyperparameters tuning. A Modified HS (MHS) is also proposed, forming MHS-RF, for effective yet efficient search of the RF hyperparameters. Along with parallel computing, MHS-RF effectively reduces the computational efforts of the hyperparameters tuning procedure. The proposed hybrid models are benchmarked with standard statistical models on the Lending Club peer-to-peer lending dataset. The computational results show that a well-tuned RF have better performance than statistical models, with MHS-RF reported the best performance yet being the most efficient in hyperparameters tuning of RF.

Text (Abstract) Hyperparameters tuning of random forest with harmony search in credit scoring.pdf Download (5kB) Official URL or Download Paper: https://www.akademisains.gov.my/asmsj/article/hype...

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