A Trial of Student Self-Sponsored Peer-to-Peer Lending Based on Credit Evaluation Using Big Data Analysis

There is still no effective approach to overcome the problem of credit evaluation for Chinese students. In absence of a reliable credit evaluation system for students, the university students have to only apply through online peer-to-peer (P2P) loan platforms because Chinese financial institutions typically reject students' loan applications. Lack of students' financial records hinders financial institutes and banks to routinely evaluate the students' credit status and assign loans to them. Hence, this paper attempted to benefit from university students' diversified daily behavior data, and logistic regression (LR) and gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT) algorithms were also used to develop robust credit evaluation models for university students, in which the validation of the proposed models was assessed by a real-time P2P lending platform. In this study, the students' overdue behavior in returning books to university library was used as an index. With training 17838 samples, the proposed models performed well, while GBDT-based model outperformed in identification of “bad borrowers.” Based on the proposed models, a self-sponsored peer-to-peer loan platform was established and developed in a Chinese university for ten months, and the achieved findings demonstrated that adopting such credit evaluation models can effectively reduce the default ratio.