An Effective Model Between Mobile Phone Usage and P2P Default Behavior

P2P online lending platforms have become increasingly developed. However, these platforms may suffer a serious loss caused by default behaviors of borrowers. In this paper, we present an effective default behavior prediction model to reduce default risk in P2P lending. The proposed model uses mobile phone usage data, which are generated from widely used mobile phones. We extract features from five aspects, including consumption, social network, mobility, socioeconomic, and individual attribute. Based on these features, we propose a joint decision model, which makes a default risk judgment through combining Random Forests with Light Gradient Boosting Machine. Validated by a real-world dataset collected by a mobile carrier and a P2P lending company in China, the proposed model not only demonstrates satisfactory performance on the evaluation metrics but also outperforms the existing methods in this area. Based on these results, the proposed model implies the high feasibility and potential to be adopted in real-world P2P online lending platforms.