CatBoost

Credit Risk Estimation with Non-Financial Features: Evidence from a Synthetic Istanbul Dataset ArXiv ID: 2512.12783 “View on arXiv” Authors: Atalay Denknalbant, Emre Sezdi, Zeki Furkan Kutlu, Polat Goktas Abstract Financial exclusion constrains entrepreneurship, increases income volatility, and widens wealth gaps. Underbanked consumers in Istanbul often have no bureau file because their earnings and payments flow through informal channels. To study how such borrowers can be evaluated we create a synthetic dataset of one hundred thousand Istanbul residents that reproduces first quarter 2025 TÜİK census marginals and telecom usage patterns. Retrieval augmented generation feeds these public statistics into the OpenAI o3 model, which synthesises realistic yet private records. Each profile contains seven socio demographic variables and nine alternative attributes that describe phone specifications, online shopping rhythm, subscription spend, car ownership, monthly rent, and a credit card flag. To test the impact of the alternative financial data CatBoost, LightGBM, and XGBoost are each trained in two versions. Demo models use only the socio demographic variables; Full models include both socio demographic and alternative attributes. Across five fold stratified validation the alternative block raises area under the curve by about one point three percentage and lifts balanced (F_{“1”}) from roughly 0.84 to 0.95, a fourteen percent gain. We contribute an open Istanbul 2025 Q1 synthetic dataset, a fully reproducible modeling pipeline, and empirical evidence that a concise set of behavioural attributes can approach bureau level discrimination power while serving borrowers who lack formal credit records. These findings give lenders and regulators a transparent blueprint for extending fair and safe credit access to the underbanked. ...

Can Machine Learning Algorithms Outperform Traditional Models for Option Pricing? ArXiv ID: 2510.01446 “View on arXiv” Authors: Georgy Milyushkov Abstract This study investigates the application of machine learning techniques, specifically Neural Networks, Random Forests, and CatBoost for option pricing, in comparison to traditional models such as Black-Scholes and Heston Model. Using both synthetically generated data and real market option data, each model is evaluated in predicting the option price. The results show that machine learning models can capture complex, non-linear relationships in option prices and, in several cases, outperform both Black-Scholes and Heston models. These findings highlight the potential of data-driven methods to improve pricing accuracy and better reflect market dynamics. ...

Machine Learning-based Relative Valuation of Municipal Bonds ArXiv ID: 2408.02273 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract The trading ecosystem of the Municipal (muni) bond is complex and unique. With nearly 2% of securities from over a million securities outstanding trading daily, determining the value or relative value of a bond among its peers is challenging. Traditionally, relative value calculation has been done using rule-based or heuristics-driven approaches, which may introduce human biases and often fail to account for complex relationships between the bond characteristics. We propose a data-driven model to develop a supervised similarity framework for the muni bond market based on CatBoost algorithm. This algorithm learns from a large-scale dataset to identify bonds that are similar to each other based on their risk profiles. This allows us to evaluate the price of a muni bond relative to a cohort of bonds with a similar risk profile. We propose and deploy a back-testing methodology to compare various benchmarks and the proposed methods and show that the similarity-based method outperforms both rule-based and heuristic-based methods. ...