A two-stage credit scoring model based on random forest: Evidence from Chinese small firms

Small firms are major contributors to most economies, often supported by government policies. However, the credit scoring of small firms is complicated and costly, making it a challenging field of research. Using loan data from 3045 small firms in China, we design a two-stage expert system for default prediction that quantifies the variables and thresholds that have a key impact. Firstly, we use SMOTE to deal with the imbalanced data and secondly, we employ random forest to build predictive credit features. Dominance analysis shows that, when making default assessments on Chinese small firms, it is important to consider not only financial factors, but also non-financial and macroeconomic factors. In particular, the net cash profit, the firm's legal disputes and the per capita disposable income of urban residents are key factors in credit scoring. Robustness tests show that our proposed methodology performs better than other machine learning models, and this result is robust with observations from other countries.