Cited by 1,284Financial Distress and Bankruptcy PredictionImbalanced Data Classification TechniquesForecasting Techniques and Applications

Benchmarking state-of-the-art classification algorithms for credit scoring: an update of research

Open access
Lessmann, Stefan, Baesens, Bart, Seow, Hsin-Vonn, Thomas, Lyn C.·2015·European Journal of Operational Research

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1016/j.ejor.2015.05.030

Cites

166 of 166 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Many benchmarking studies have illustrated that complex analytical techniques only provide marginal performance gains on structured, tabular data sets such as fraud detection, credit scoring and marketing analytics.

    “Many benchmarking studies have illustrated that complex analytical techniques only provide marginal performance gains on structured, tabular data sets as frequently encountered in common classification tasks such as fraud detection, credit scoring and marketing analytics (Baesens et al., 2003; Lessmann et al., 2015).”

    From Data engineering for fraud detection (2021) · cites this paper as Lessmann et al., 2015

    In §5.1 (page unavailable), the paper explicitly rejects the inference that complex classifiers offer little advantage over simpler methods, finding that some advanced methods significantly outperform logistic regression in credit scoring. It also finds that sophistication does not reliably improve accuracy; its conclusions are limited to credit scoring, not fraud detection or marketing analytics. (LLM, conf=0.88)

    Checked by a reasoning model — may be wrong.

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • The result that random forests outperform logistic regression is consistent with benchmarking experiments performed across various business domains reported in the literature.

    “This result is unsurprising and is fully consistent with the results of benchmarking experiments performed across various business domains and reported in the literature [2, 17].”

    From Why you should stop predicting customer churn and start using uplift models (2021) · cites this paper as [2]

    Section 5.2 reports that logistic regression predicted significantly less accurately than the other selected classifiers, including random forests. But the paper benchmarks retail credit scoring across eight datasets, not experiments across various business domains; that broader scope is unsupported by this source. (LLM, conf=0.88)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • Support vector machines and artificial neural networks are better-suited to handle continuous covariates, which occur frequently in financial time series forecasting.

    “One of the explanations for their popularity for time series forecasting (cf. other advanced techniques such as bagged or boosted decision trees), is that they are better-suited to handle continuous covariates (Lessmann, Baesens, Seow, & Thomas, 2015), which occur frequently in financial time series forecasting (e.g., prices, price differences or technical indicators).”

    From Bridging the divide in financial market forecasting: machine learners vs. financial economists (2016) · cites this paper as Lessmann, Baesens, Seow, & Thomas, 2015

    Section 4.3 (page not available) says ANNs and SVMs benefit when nominal variables are encoded as numbers, while classification trees can work with mixed nominal and numeric data. This supports a preference for numeric inputs, but does not establish that ANNs and SVMs handle continuous covariates better than bagged or boosted trees. (LLM, conf=0.82)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • Complex analytical models such as random forests, boosting methods, support vector machines, neural networks and deep learning do not always significantly outperform simple analytical models such as logistic regression.

    “We would also like to note that these complex models not always significantly outperform simple analytical models such as logistic regression (Baesens et al., 2003; Lessmann et al., 2015)”

    From Data engineering for fraud detection (2021) · cites this paper as Lessmann et al., 2015

    Section 5.1 (page unavailable) says sophisticated methods do not necessarily improve accuracy and reports that dynamic ensembles performed less accurately than simpler alternatives, including logistic regression. That supports the qualified point for the credit-scoring classifiers studied, but the paper's listed algorithms do not include deep learning, so it does not establish the claim for every example named. (LLM, conf=0.84)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

4 of the 170 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Research works printed but not linked: 2

  1. [37]37. Hernández-Orallo, J., Flach, P. A., & Ramirez, C. F. (2011). Brier Curves: A New Cost-Based Visualisation of Classifier Performance. In L. Getoor & T. Scheffer (Eds.), Proc. of the 28th Intern. Conf. on Machine Learning (pp. 585-592). Bellevue, WA, USA: Omnipress.
  2. [64]64. Pundir, S., & Seshadri, R. (2012). A novel concept of partial lorenz curve and partial gini index. International Journal of Engineering ,Science and Innovative Technology, 1, 296-301.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Lessmann, S., Baesens, B., Seow, H.-V., & Thomas, L. C.
Affiliations
  • Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (DE)
  • University of Southampton (GB)
  • University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus (MY)
Corresponding author
Lessmann, Stefan
Venue
European Journal of Operational Research
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
2015-11
Volume
247
Issue
1
Pages
124-136
ISSN
0377-2217 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W2131816657
Cited by
1,284
References
170
Citations by year
2026: 218 · 2025: 193 · 2024: 109 · 2023: 129 · 2022: 121 · 2021: 134 · 2020: 109 · 2019: 112 · 2018: 73 · 2017: 48 · 2016: 29 · 2015: 7 · 2014: 1 · 2012: 1
FWCI
230.52
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • European Journal of Operational Research (publishedVersion)
  • ePrints Soton (University of Southampton) (acceptedVersion)
  • Lirias (submittedVersion, other-oa)
  • RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Accounting › Financial Distress and Bankruptcy Prediction
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Imbalanced Data Classification Techniques
  • Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Management Science and Operations Research › Forecasting Techniques and Applications
Keywords
credit scoring, machine learning classifiers, benchmarking, classifier comparison, credit risk assessment

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review