Title
What does your Facebook profile reveal about your creditworthiness? Using alternative data for microfinance.
Abstract
Microfinance has known a large increase in popularity, yet the scoring of such credit still remains a difficult challenge. Credit scoring traditionally uses socio-demographic and credit data, which we complement in an innovative manner with data from Facebook. A distinction is made between the relationships that the available data imply: (1) LALs are persons who resemble one another in some manner, (2) friends have a clearly articulated friendship relationship on Facebook, and (3) BFFs are friends that interact with one another. Our analyses show two interesting conclusions for this emerging application: the BFFs have a higher predictive value then the person's friends and secondly, the interest-based data that define LALs, yield better results than the social network data. Moreover, the model built on interest data is not significantly worse than the model that uses all available data, hence demonstrating the potential of Facebook data in a microfinance setting.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1080/01605682.2018.1434402
JOURNAL OF THE OPERATIONAL RESEARCH SOCIETY
Keywords
Field
DocType
Data mining,decision support systems,microcredit,credit scoring,networks and graphs,default prediction
Data science,Computer science,Popularity,Decision support system,Microfinance,Management science
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
70.0
3.0
0160-5682
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.35
11
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Sofie De Cnudde191.54
Julie Moeyersoms2232.61
Marija Stankova3141.70
Ellen Tobback4101.33
Vinayak Javaly510.35
David Martens6669.52