A decision support model for investment on P2P lending platform

PLoS One. 2017 Sep 6;12(9):e0184242. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0184242. eCollection 2017.

Abstract

Peer-to-peer (P2P) lending, as a novel economic lending model, has triggered new challenges on making effective investment decisions. In a P2P lending platform, one lender can invest N loans and a loan may be accepted by M investors, thus forming a bipartite graph. Basing on the bipartite graph model, we built an iteration computation model to evaluate the unknown loans. To validate the proposed model, we perform extensive experiments on real-world data from the largest American P2P lending marketplace-Prosper. By comparing our experimental results with those obtained by Bayes and Logistic Regression, we show that our computation model can help borrowers select good loans and help lenders make good investment decisions. Experimental results also show that the Logistic classification model is a good complement to our iterative computation model, which motivates us to integrate the two classification models. The experimental results of the hybrid classification model demonstrate that the logistic classification model and our iteration computation model are complementary to each other. We conclude that the hybrid model (i.e., the integration of iterative computation model and Logistic classification model) is more efficient and stable than the individual model alone.

MeSH terms

  • Decision Making
  • Decision Support Techniques*
  • Financing, Organized* / methods
  • Financing, Personal / methods
  • Humans
  • Investments*
  • Models, Economic
  • Peer Group

Grants and funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (61202011 and 61272152), and Ph.D. Programs Foundation of Ministry of Education of China (20120121120039).