Direct versus indirect credit scoring classifications

We introduce a new approach to assigning bank account holders to ‘good’ or ‘bad’ classes based on their future behaviour. Traditional methods simply treat the classes as qualitatively distinct, and seek to predict them directly, using statistical techniques such as logistic regression or discriminant analysis based on application data or observations of previous behaviour. We note, however, that the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ classes are defined in terms of variables such as the amount overdrawn at the time at which the classification is required. This permits an alternative, ‘indirect’, form of classification model in which, first, the variables defining the classes are predicted, for example using regression, and then the class membership is derived deterministically from these predicted values. We compare traditional direct methods with these new indirect methods using both real bank data and simulated data. The new methods appear to perform very similarly to the traditional methods, and we discuss why this might be. Finally, we note that the indirect methods also have certain other advantages over the traditional direct methods.