Enhancing transparency and fairness in automated credit decisions: an explainable novel hybrid machine learning approach.

This paper uses a generalised stacking method to introduce a novel hybrid model that combines a one-dimensional convolutional neural network 1DCNN with extreme gradient boosting XGBoost. We compared the predictive accuracies of the proposed hybrid architecture with three conventional algorithms-1DCNN, XGBoost and logistic regression (LR) using a dataset of over twenty thousand peer-to-peer (P2P) consumer credit observations. By leveraging the SHAP algorithm, the research provides a detailed analysis of feature importance, contributing to the model's predictions and offering insights into the overall and individual significance of different features.