One of the key decisions financial institutions have to make as part of their daily operations is to decide whether or not to grant a loan to an applicant. With the emergence of large-scale data-storing facilities, huge amounts of data have been stored regarding the repayment behavior of past...

Start-ups are crucial in the modern economy as they provide dynamism and growth. Research on the performance of new ventures increasingly investigates initial resources as determinants of success. Initial resources are said to be important because they imprint the firm at start-up, limit its...

An important objective of data mining is the development of predictive models. Based on a number of observations, a model is constructed that allows the analysts to provide classifications or predictions for new observations. Currently, most research focuses on improving the accuracy or...

Decision trees are a widely used knowledge representation in machine learning. However, one of their main drawbacks is the inherent replication of isomorphic subtrees, as a result of which the produced classifiers might become too large to be comprehensible by the human experts that have to...

This article reviews some of the applications of mathematical programming infinance. Of course mathematical programming has long been recognised as a vitalmodelling approach to solve optimization problems in finance. Markowitz’s NobelPrize winning work on portfolio optimization showed how...

Credit scoring is used by lenders to minimise the chance of taking an unprofitable account with the overall objective of maximising profit. Profit is generated when a good customer accepts an offer from the organisation. So it is also necessary to get the customers to accept the offer. A lender...

Successful start-up firms make a valuable contribution to economic growth and development.Models that provide insight into the management of start-up firms are therefore important. We consider the problem of managing inventory and production capacity in a start-up manufacturing firm and argue...

Tremendous growth in the credit industry has spurred the need for Credit Scoring and Its Applications, the only book that details the mathematical models that help creditors make intelligent credit risk decisions.Creditors of all types make risk decisions every day, often haphazardly. This book...

Consumer credit risk assessment involves the use of risk assessment tools to manage a borrower’s account from the time of pre-screening a potential application through to the management of the account during its life and possible write-off. The riskiness of lending to a credit applicant is...

The use of credit scoring - the quantitative and statistical techniques to assess the credit risks involved in lending to consumers - has been one of the most successful if unsung applications of mathematics in business for the last fifty years. Now with lenders changing their objectives from...