Learning From Labeled And Unlabeled Data: An Empirical Study Across Techniques And Domains

There has been increased interest in devising learning techniques that combine unlabeled data with labeled data ? i.e. semi-supervised learning. However, to the best of our knowledge, no study has been performed across various techniques and different types and amounts of labeled and unlabeled data. Moreover, most of the published work on semi-supervised learning techniques assumes that the labeled and unlabeled data come from the same distribution. It is possible for the labeling process to be associated with a selection bias such that the distributions of data points in the labeled and unlabeled sets are different. Not correcting for such bias can result in biased function approximation with potentially poor performance. In this paper, we present an empirical study of various semi-supervised learning techniques on a variety of datasets. We attempt to answer various questions such as the effect of independence or relevance amongst features, the effect of the size of the labeled and unlabeled sets and the effect of noise. We also investigate the impact of sample-selection bias on the semi-supervised learning techniques under study and implement a bivariate probit technique particularly designed to correct for such bias

Development of a Machine Learning-Based Financial Risk Control System

With the gradual end of the COVID-19 outbreak and the gradual recovery of the economy, more and more individuals and businesses are in need of loans. This demand brings business opportunities to various financial institutions, but also brings new risks. The traditional loan application review is mostly manual and relies on the business experience of the auditor, which has the disadvantages of not being able to process large quantities and being inefficient. Since the traditional audit processing method is no longer suitable some other method of reducing the rate of non-performing loans and detecting fraud in applications is urgently needed by financial institutions. In this project, a financial risk control model is built by using various machine learning algorithms. The model is used to replace the traditional manual approach to review loan applications. It improves the speed of review as well as the accuracy and approval rate of the review. Machine learning algorithms were also used in this project to create a loan user scorecard system that better reflects changes in user information compared to the credit card systems used by financial institutions today. In this project, the data imbalance problem and the performance improvement problem are also explored

Accounts Receivable Seamless Prediction for Companies by Using Multiclass Data Mining Model

Most companies find themselves in highly competitive markets nowadays. As a result, many companies struggle to manage their financial obligation to pay their supplier on time. Delayed payments to suppliers can create all kinds of issue with the supplier's cash flow. Finding a way to reduce or avoid any potential losses because of this delay is needed. Currently, data mining techniques have been widely applied to the assessment or prediction of credit scores for customers in the banking industry (credit scoring), and the most commonly used method is classification. Based on previous studies, research has been conducted to develop a data mining model to produce the best classification model to predict a customer’s payment capabilities. With the application of data mining approaches using oversampling, feature selection (FS) algorithm, including Relief, Information Gain Ratio, PCA, and multiclass algorithm, including Random Forest, SVM, One-versus-all, All-versus-all and Error Correcting Output Coding (ECOC), is expected to produce good accuracy to predict the ability of these payments. As a result of this research, the model proposed can provide the best classification model with 84.24% accuracy and AUC value of 95.3% using sample dataset of manufacturing industry within three years perio

Cost-sensitive ensemble learning: a unifying framework

Over the years, a plethora of cost-sensitive methods have been proposed for learning on data when different types of misclassification errors incur different costs. Our contribution is a unifying framework that provides a comprehensive and insightful overview on cost-sensitive ensemble methods, pinpointing their differences and similarities via a fine-grained categorization. Our framework contains natural extensions and generalisations of ideas across methods, be it AdaBoost, Bagging or Random Forest, and as a result not only yields all methods known to date but also some not previously considered.publishedVersio

Data Science for Finance: Targeted Learning from (Big) Data to Economic Stability and Financial Risk Management

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Information Management, specialization in Statistics and EconometricsThe modelling, measurement, and management of systemic financial stability remains a critical issue in most countries. Policymakers, regulators, and managers depend on complex models for financial stability and risk management. The models are compelled to be robust, realistic, and consistent with all relevant available data. This requires great data disclosure, which is deemed to have the highest quality standards. However, stressed situations, financial crises, and pandemics are the source of many new risks with new requirements such as new data sources and different models. This dissertation aims to show the data quality challenges of high-risk situations such as pandemics or economic crisis and it try to theorize the new machine learning models for predictive and longitudes time series models. In the first study (Chapter Two) we analyzed and compared the quality of official datasets available for COVID-19 as a best practice for a recent high-risk situation with dramatic effects on financial stability. We used comparative statistical analysis to evaluate the accuracy of data collection by a national (Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention) and two international (World Health Organization; European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control) organizations based on the value of systematic measurement errors. We combined excel files, text mining techniques, and manual data entries to extract the COVID-19 data from official reports and to generate an accurate profile for comparisons. The findings show noticeable and increasing measurement errors in the three datasets as the pandemic outbreak expanded and more countries contributed data for the official repositories, raising data comparability concerns and pointing to the need for better coordination and harmonized statistical methods. The study offers a COVID-19 combined dataset and dashboard with minimum systematic measurement errors and valuable insights into the potential problems in using databanks without carefully examining the metadata and additional documentation that describe the overall context of data. In the second study (Chapter Three) we discussed credit risk as the most significant source of risk in banking as one of the most important sectors of financial institutions. We proposed a new machine learning approach for online credit scoring which is enough conservative and robust for unstable and high-risk situations. This Chapter is aimed at the case of credit scoring in risk management and presents a novel method to be used for the default prediction of high-risk branches or customers. This study uses the Kruskal-Wallis non-parametric statistic to form a conservative credit-scoring model and to study its impact on modeling performance on the benefit of the credit provider. The findings show that the new credit scoring methodology represents a reasonable coefficient of determination and a very low false-negative rate. It is computationally less expensive with high accuracy with around 18% improvement in Recall/Sensitivity. Because of the recent perspective of continued credit/behavior scoring, our study suggests using this credit score for non-traditional data sources for online loan providers to allow them to study and reveal changes in client behavior over time and choose the reliable unbanked customers, based on their application data. This is the first study that develops an online non-parametric credit scoring system, which can reselect effective features automatically for continued credit evaluation and weigh them out by their level of contribution with a good diagnostic ability. In the third study (Chapter Four) we focus on the financial stability challenges faced by insurance companies and pension schemes when managing systematic (undiversifiable) mortality and longevity risk. For this purpose, we first developed a new ensemble learning strategy for panel time-series forecasting and studied its applications to tracking respiratory disease excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic. The layered learning approach is a solution related to ensemble learning to address a given predictive task by different predictive models when direct mapping from inputs to outputs is not accurate. We adopt a layered learning approach to an ensemble learning strategy to solve the predictive tasks with improved predictive performance and take advantage of multiple learning processes into an ensemble model. In this proposed strategy, the appropriate holdout for each model is specified individually. Additionally, the models in the ensemble are selected by a proposed selection approach to be combined dynamically based on their predictive performance. It provides a high-performance ensemble model to automatically cope with the different kinds of time series for each panel member. For the experimental section, we studied more than twelve thousand observations in a portfolio of 61-time series (countries) of reported respiratory disease deaths with monthly sampling frequency to show the amount of improvement in predictive performance. We then compare each country’s forecasts of respiratory disease deaths generated by our model with the corresponding COVID-19 deaths in 2020. The results of this large set of experiments show that the accuracy of the ensemble model is improved noticeably by using different holdouts for different contributed time series methods based on the proposed model selection method. These improved time series models provide us proper forecasting of respiratory disease deaths for each country, exhibiting high correlation (0.94) with Covid-19 deaths in 2020. In the fourth study (Chapter Five) we used the new ensemble learning approach for time series modeling, discussed in the previous Chapter, accompany by K-means clustering for forecasting life tables in COVID-19 times. Stochastic mortality modeling plays a critical role in public pension design, population and public health projections, and in the design, pricing, and risk management of life insurance contracts and longevity-linked securities. There is no general method to forecast the mortality rate applicable to all situations especially for unusual years such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In this Chapter, we investigate the feasibility of using an ensemble of traditional and machine learning time series methods to empower forecasts of age-specific mortality rates for groups of countries that share common longevity trends. We use Generalized Age-Period-Cohort stochastic mortality models to capture age and period effects, apply K-means clustering to time series to group countries following common longevity trends, and use ensemble learning to forecast life expectancy and annuity prices by age and sex. To calibrate models, we use data for 14 European countries from 1960 to 2018. The results show that the ensemble method presents the best robust results overall with minimum RMSE in the presence of structural changes in the shape of time series at the time of COVID-19. In this dissertation’s conclusions (Chapter Six), we provide more detailed insights about the overall contributions of this dissertation on the financial stability and risk management by data science, opportunities, limitations, and avenues for future research about the application of data science in finance and economy

Investigation into the Predictive Capability of Macro-Economic Features in Modelling Credit Risk for Small Medium Enterprises

This research project investigates the predictive capability of macro-economic features in modelling credit risk for small medium enterprises (SME/SMEs). There have been indications that there is strong correlation between economic growth and the size of the SME sector in an economy. However, since the financial crisis and consequent policies and regulations, SMEs have been hampered in attempts to access credit. It has also been noted that while there is a substantial amount of credit risk literature, there is little research on how macro-economic factors affect credit risk. Being able to improve credit scoring by even a small amount can have a very positive effect on a financial institution\u27s profits, reputation and ability to support the economy. Typically, in the credit scoring process two methods of scoring are carried out, application scoring model and behavioural scoring model. These models for predicting customers who are likely to default usually rely upon financial, demographic and transactional data as the predictive inputs. This research investigates the use of a much coarser source of data at a macro-economic level by a low level and high level regions in Ireland. Features such as level of employment/unemployment, education attainment, consumer spending trends and default levels by different banking products will be evaluated as part of the research project. In the course of this research, techniques and methods are established for evaluating the usefulness of macro-economic features. These are subsequently introduced into the predictive models to be evaluated. It was found that while employing coarse classification and subsequently choosing the macro-economic features with the highest information value in the predictive model, the accuracy across all performance measures improved significantly. This has proven that macro-economic features have the potential to be used in modelling credit risk for SMEs in the future

Addressing class imbalance for logistic regression

The challenge of class imbalance arises in classification problem when the minority class is observed much less than the majority class. This characteristic is endemic in many domains. Work by [Owen, 2007] has shown that, in a theoretical context related to infinite imbalance, logistic regression behaves such that all data in the rare class can be replaced by their mean vector to achieve the same coefficient estimates. Such results suggest that cluster structure among the minority class may be a specific problem in highly imbalanced logistic regression. In this thesis, we focus on highly imbalanced logistic regression and develop mitigation methods and diagnostic tools. Theoretically, we extend the [Owen, 2007] results to show the phenomenon remains true for both weighted and penalized likelihood methods in the infinitely imbalanced regime, which suggests these alternative choices to logistic regression are not enough for highly imbalanced logistic regression. For mitigation methods, we propose a novel relabeling solution based on relabeling the minority class to handle imbalance problem when using logistic regression, which essentially assigns new labels to the minority class observations. Two algorithms (the Genetic algorithm and the Expectation Maximization algorithm) are formalized to serve as tools for computing this relabeling. In simulation and real data experiments, we show that logistic regression is not able to provide the best out-of-sample predictive performance, and our relabeling approach that can capture underlying structure in the minority class is often superior. For diagnostic tools to detect highly imbalanced logistic regression, different hypothesis testing methods, along with a graphical tool are proposed, based on the mathematical insights about highly imbalanced logistic regression. Simulation studies provide evidence that combining our diagnostic tools with mitigation methods as a systematic strategy has the potential to alleviate the class imbalance problem among logistic regression.Open Acces