Fused least absolute shrinkage and selection operator for credit scoring

Credit scoring can be defined as the set of statistical models and techniques that help financial institutions in their credit decision makings. In this paper, we consider a coarse classification method based on fused least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) penalization. By adopting fused LASSO, one can deal continuous as well as discrete variables in a unified framework. For computational efficiency, we develop a penalization path algorithm. Through numerical examples, we compare the performances of fused LASSO and LASSO with dummy variable coding.