Search arXivSearch

arXiv · 1902.04954

Risk Prediction of Peer-to-Peer Lending Market by a LSTM Model with Macroeconomic Factor

Abstract

In the peer to peer (P2P) lending platform, investors hope to maximize their return while minimizing the risk through a comprehensive understanding of the P2P market. A low and stable average default rate across all the borrowers denotes a healthy P2P market and provides investors more confidence in a promising investment. Therefore, having a powerful model to describe the trend of the default rate in the P2P market is crucial. Different from previous studies that focus on modeling the default rate at the individual level, in this paper, we are the first to comprehensively explore the monthly trend of the default rate at the aggregative level for the P2P data from October 2007 to January 2016 in the US. We use the long short term memory (LSTM) approach to sequentially predict the default risk of the borrowers in Lending Club, which is the largest P2P lending platform in the US. Although being first applied in modeling the P2P sequential data, the LSTM approach shows its great potential by outperforming traditionally utilized time series models in our experiments. Furthermore, incorporating the macroeconomic feature \textit{unemp\_rate} (i.e., unemployment rate) can improve the LSTM performance by decreasing RMSE on both the training and the testing datasets. Our study can broaden the applications of the LSTM algorithm by using it on the sequential P2P data and guide the investors in making investment strategies.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Yan Wang, Xuelei Sherry Ni. 2020-09-09. Risk Prediction of Peer-to-Peer Lending Market by a LSTM Model with Macroeconomic Factor. https://doi.org/10.1145/3374135.3385287

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Rollout Total Correlation for Deep Reinforcement Learning

Learning task-relevant representations is crucial for reinforcement learning. Recent approaches aim to learn such representations by improving the temporal consistency in the observed transitions. However, they only consider individual transitions and can fail to achieve long-term consistency. Instead, we argue that capturing aspects of the state that correlate with other states and actions of the trajectory---even more distant in the future---could further help in extracting task-relevant information. Hence, in this paper we investigate how to learn representations by maximizing the rollout total correlation, the correlation among all learned representations and actions within the trajectories produced by the agent. For improving rollout total correlation, we propose to combine two complementary lower bounds based on a generative and a discriminative model, combined with a simple and effective technique of chunk-wise mini-batching. Furthermore, we propose an intrinsic reward based on the learned representation for better exploration. Experimental evaluations on a set of challenging image-based simulated control tasks show that our method achieves better sample efficiency, and robustness to both white noise and natural video backgrounds compared to leading baselines.

cs.LG

Reward Shaping to Mitigate Reward Hacking in RLHF

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is widely used to align large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, RLHF remains vulnerable to \emph{reward hacking}, whereby a policy exploits imperfections in the reward function instead of learning the intended behavior, thereby undermining alignment. Although reward shaping can stabilize RLHF training and partially mitigate reward hacking, shaping methods and their underlying design principles have not been systematically investigated. To address this gap, we conduct a comprehensive study of prevalent reward-shaping techniques. Our analysis identifies two key design principles: (1) the reinforcement-learning reward should be bounded, and (2) it should grow rapidly at first and then gradually saturate. Motivated by these principles, we propose Preference as Reward (PAR), a novel method that uses the latent preferences encoded in the reward model as the reinforcement-learning signal. We further show that PAR possesses two variance-reduction properties that stabilize RLHF training and substantially widen the practical window for early stopping. Our evaluation consists of two parts. First, we compare PAR with several other reward-shaping strategies using Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) as the reinforcement-learning algorithm and Gemma2-2B as the base model. Second, we compare PAR with the vanilla baseline (i.e., unshaped reward) across four base models and four reinforcement-learning algorithms. In the first set of experiments, PAR consistently outperforms other reward-shaping methods and also reflects high data efficiency and robustness. The second set of experiments shows that PAR is particularly effective for actor-critic RL algorithms when value estimates become unstable and demonstrates its effectiveness across different base models. The code is available at https://github.com/PorUna-byte/PAR.

cs.LG

Trajectory Entropy Reinforcement Learning for Robust Robot Motor Skill Learning

Simplicity is a critical inductive bias for designing data-driven controllers, especially when robustness is important. Despite the impressive results of deep reinforcement learning in complex control tasks, it is prone to capturing intricate and spurious correlations between observations and actions, leading to failure under slight perturbations to the environment. To tackle this problem, in this work we introduce a novel inductive bias towards simple policies in reinforcement learning. The simplicity inductive bias is introduced by minimizing the entropy of entire action trajectories, corresponding to the number of bits required to describe information in action trajectories after the agent observes state trajectories. Our reinforcement learning agent, Trajectory Entropy Reinforcement Learning, is optimized to minimize the trajectory entropy while maximizing rewards. We show that the trajectory entropy can be effectively estimated by learning a variational parameterized action prediction model, and use the prediction model to construct an information-regularized reward function. Furthermore, we construct a practical algorithm that enables the joint optimization of models, including the policy and the prediction model. Experimental evaluations on several high-dimensional locomotion tasks show that our learned policies produce more cyclical and consistent action trajectories, and achieve superior performance, and robustness to noise and dynamic changes than the state-of-the-art.

cs.LG