A Meta-Path-Based Evaluation Method for Enterprise Credit Risk.

Nowadays, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have become an essential part of the national economy. With the increasing number of such enterprises, how to evaluate their credit risk becomes a hot issue. Unlike big enterprises with massive data to analyse, it is hard to find enough primary information of SMEs to assess their financial status, which makes the credit risk evaluation result less accurate. Limited by the lack of primary data, how to infer SMEs' credit risk from secondary data, such as information about their upstream, downstream, parent, and subsidiary enterprises, attracts big attention from industry and academy. Targeting on accurately evaluating the credit risk of the SME, in this study, we exploit the representative power of the information network on various kinds of SME entities and SME relationships to solve the problem. With that, a heterogeneous information network of SMEs is built to mine enterprise's secondary information. Furthermore, a novel feature named meta-path feature is proposed to measure the credit risk, which makes us able to evaluate the financial status of SMEs from various perspectives. Experiments show that our proposed meta-path feature is effective to identify SMEs with credit risks.

A Path-Based Feature Selection Algorithm for Enterprise Credit Risk Evaluation.

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in exploring diversified features to measure small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) credit risk. Path-based features, revealing logical connections between SMEs, are widely adopted as informative feature kinds for causal inference in credit risk evaluation. Since there may exist thousands of feature paths to the target enterprise, to evaluate its credit risk, how to select the most informative path-based features becomes a challenging problem. To solve the problem, in this paper, we propose a novel method of feature selection, considering both similarity and importance on features' structured semantics as the factors of informativeness. With this, the proposed method can effectively rank both conventional and path-based features together. Furthermore, to improve the efficiency of the method, a heuristic algorithm is proposed to fast search for the candidate features. Through extensive experiments, we show our method performs competitively with other state-of-the-art selection methods.