A multi-gene symbolic regression approach for predicting LGD : A benchmark comparative study

Abstract: Under the Basel accords for measuring regulatory capital requirements, the set of credit risk parameters probability of default (PD), exposure at default (EAD) and loss given default (LGD) are measured with own estimates by the internal rating based approach. The estimated parameters are also the foundation of understanding the actual risk in a banks credit portfolio. The predictive performance of such models are therefore interesting to examine. The credit risk parameter LGD has been seen to give low performance for predictive models and LGD values are generally hard to estimate. The main purpose of this thesis is to analyse the predictive performance of a multi-gene genetic programming approach to symbolic regression compared to three benchmark regression models. The goal of multi-gene symbolic regression is to estimate the underlying relationship in the data through a linear combination of a set of generated mathematical expressions. The benchmark models are Logit Transformed Regression, Beta Regression and Regression Tree. All benchmark models are frequently used in the area. The data used to compare the models is a set of randomly selected, de-identified loans from the portfolios of underlying U.S. residential mortgage-backed securities retrieved from International Finance Research. The conclusion from implementing and comparing the models is that, the credit risk parameter LGD is continued difficult to estimated, the symbolic regression approach did not yield a better predictive ability than the benchmark models and it did not seem to find the underlying relationship in the data. The benchmark models are more user-friendly with easier implementation and they all requires less calculation complexity than symbolic regression.