Assessing and predicting small industrial enterprises’ credit ratings: A fuzzy decision-making approach

Corporate credit-rating assessment plays a crucial role in helping financial institutions make their lending decisions and in reducing the financial constraints of small enterprises. This paper presents a new approach for small industrial enterprises’ credit-rating assessment using fuzzy decision-making methods and then tests this novel approach using real bank loan data from 1820 small industrial enterprises in China. The procedure of the proposed rating approach includes (1) using triangular fuzzy numbers to quantify the qualitative evaluation indicators; (2) adopting a correlation analysis, univariate analysis, and stepping backward feature selection method to select the input features; (3) employing the best-worst method (BWM) combined with the entropy weight method (EWM), the fuzzy c-means algorithm and the technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) to classify small enterprises into different rating classes; and (4) applying the lattice degree of nearness to predict a new loan applicant’s rating. We also conduct 10-fold cross-validation to evaluate the predictive performance of our proposed approach. The predictive results demonstrate that our proposed data-processing and feature selection approaches have better accuracy than the alternative approaches in predicting default, offering bankers a new valuable rating system to assist their decision making.