arXiv:2509.09855stat.MLcs.LG2025-09

用信息论统一信用风险评估指标,实现公平可解释的评分卡建模。

An Information-Theoretic Framework for Credit Risk Modeling: Unifying Industry Practice with Statistical Theory for Fair and Interpretable Scorecards

  • 将行业常用指标归为信息散度,揭示其理论本质。
  • 首次给出IV和PSI的置信区间与假设检验方法。
  • 兼顾预测性能与公平性,适合监管环境下的模型设计。

信用风险建模广泛使用证据权重(WoE)和信息值(IV)进行特征工程,以及总体稳定性指数(PSI)进行漂移监测,但这些指标缺乏理论基础。本文建立统一的信息论框架,证明IV等于好坏客户在相同分箱下所计算的杰弗里斯散度(PSI)。通过应用δ方法对WoE变换推导出IV和PSI的标准误,首次实现正式的假设检验与概率公平约束。将信用建模中的性能-公平性权衡形式化为:在最大化预测性IV的同时最小化受保护属性的IV。采用深度为1的XGBoost决策桩自动分箱,比较逻辑回归(独热编码)、WoE转换与约束型XGBoost三种编码策略,三者预测性能相当(AUC 0.82–0.84),表明基于信息论的分箱优于编码方式选择。混合整数规划可追踪性能-公平性前沿上的帕累托最优解并量化不确定性。该框架首次为广泛使用的信用风险指标提供严谨统计基础,并为受监管环境下准确与公平的平衡提供系统工具。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Credit risk modeling relies extensively on Weight of Evidence (WoE) and Information Value (IV) for feature engineering, and Population Stability Index (PSI) for drift monitoring, yet their theoretical foundations remain disconnected. We establish a unified information-theoretic framework revealing these industry-standard metrics as instances of classical information divergences. Specifically, we prove that IV exactly equals PSI (Jeffreys divergence) computed between good and bad credit outcomes over identical bins. Through the delta method applied to WoE transformations, we derive standard errors for IV and PSI, enabling formal hypothesis testing and probabilistic fairness constraints for the first time. We formalize credit modeling's inherent performance-fairness trade-off as maximizing IV for predictive power while minimizing IV for protected attributes. Using automated binning with depth-1 XGBoost stumps, we compare three encoding strategies: logistic regression with one-hot encoding, WoE transformation, and constrained XGBoost. All methods achieve comparable predictive performance (AUC 0.82-0.84), demonstrating that principled, information-theoretic binning outweighs encoding choice. Mixed-integer programming traces Pareto-efficient solutions along the performance-fairness frontier with uncertainty quantification. This framework bridges theory and practice, providing the first rigorous statistical foundation for widely-used credit risk metrics while offering principled tools for balancing accuracy and fairness in regulated environments.

信用风险信息论公平性可解释

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