Generalized Partially Linear Additive Models for Credit Scoring

Credit scoring is an objective and automatic system to assess the credit risk of each customer. The logistic regression model is one of the popular methods of credit scoring to predict the default probability; however, it may not detect possible nonlinear features of predictors despite the advantages of interpretability and low computation cost. In this paper, we propose to use a generalized partially linear model as an alternative to logistic regression. We also introduce modern ensemble technologies such as bagging, boosting and random forests. We compare these methods via a simulation study and illustrate them through a German credit dataset.