A Novel Predictive Model for Housing Loan Default using Feature Generation and Explainable AI

Home Loan plays a pivotal role in today's age when one steps into purchasing their home. It has been witnessed that in many cases users are unable to pay the after taking the loan and thus the loan is slipped to NPA(Non-Performing Asset) from Standard Asset for the bank or any lending institution. The revenue generation is ceased. As the housing loan is taken against property the lenders have right to sell the property and close the dues, but the process is lengthy as judicial procedures are involved. In most cases, the property value is much less than the calculated loan amount (Principal + Interest). In this study we examined the several ML methods to identify the loan default before disbursing the loan to the applicant. This matter has been studied widely and used the predictive analytics to find out the relationship between attributes and the target variable. Predictive Analytics enables us to feed optimal set of features to the ML models. The study started with 122 attributes and ended up with around 30% of features as the ideal subset for housing loan default prediction. Then, five ML models were fit into the dataset and the champion model came up with roc score 0.94, Recall 0.90 and Precision 0.94. LIME and SHAP were applied on the champion model along with the dataset for global and local interpretability. The experimental procedure concluded that ML models along with predictive analytics can arrest the loan disbursal to the ineligible applicants and will also provide the insight of such prediction with the help of model interpretability.