A Fast Survival Support Vector Regression Approach to Large Scale Credit Scoring via Safe Screening

Survival models have found wider and wider applications in credit scoring recently due to their ability to estimate the dynamics of risk over time. In this research, we propose a Buckley-James safe sample screening support vector regression (BJS4VR) algorithm to model large-scale survival data by combing the Buckley-James transformation and support vector regression. Different from previous support vector regression survival models, censored samples here are imputed using a censoring unbiased Buckley-James estimator. Safe sample screening is then applied to discard samples that guaranteed to be non-active at the final optimal solution from the original data to improve efficiency. Experimental results on the large-scale real lending club loan data have shown that the proposed BJS4VR model outperforms existing popular survival models such as RSFM, CoxRidge and CoxBoost in terms of both prediction accuracy and time efficiency. Important variables highly correlated with credit risk are also identified with the proposed method.