Predicting repayment of borrows in peer‐to‐peer social lending with deep dense convolutional network

In peer‐to‐peer lending, it is important to predict the repayment of the borrower to reduce the lender's financial loss. However, it is difficult to design a powerful feature extractor for predicting the repayment as user and transaction data continue to increase. Convolutional neural networks automatically extract useful features from big data, but they use only high‐level features; hence, it is difficult to capture a variety of representations. In this study, we propose a deep dense convolutional network for repayment prediction in social lending, which maintains the borrower's semantic information and obtains a good representation by automatically extracting important low‐ and high‐level features simultaneously. We predict the repayment of the borrower by learning discriminative features depending on the loan status. Experimental results on the Lending Club dataset show that our model is more effective than other methods. A fivefold cross‐validation is performed to run the experiments.