Tab-Attention: Self-Attention-based Stacked Generalization for Imbalanced Credit Default Prediction

Abstract: Accurately credit default prediction faces challenges due to imbalanced data and low correlation between features and labels. Existing default prediction studies on the basis of gradient boosting decision trees (GBDT), deep learning techniques, and feature selection strategies can have varying degrees of success depending on the specific task. Motivated by this, we propose Tab-Attention, a novel self-attention-based stacked generalization method for credit default prediction. This approach ensembles the potential proprietary knowledge contributions from multi-view feature spaces, to cope with low feature correlation and imbalance. We organize multi-view feature spaces according to the latent linear or nonlinear strengths between features and labels. Meanwhile, the f1 score assists the model in imbalance training to find the optimal state for identifying minority default samples. Our Tab-Attention achieves superior Recall_1 and f1_1 of default intention recognition than existing GBDT-based models and advanced deep learning by about 32.92% and 16.05% on average, respectively, while maintaining outstanding overall performance and prediction performance for non-default samples. The proposed method could ensemble essential knowledge through the self-attention mechanism, which is of great significance for a more robust future prediction system.