Domain Knowledge Incorporated Local Rule-based Explanation for ML-based Bankruptcy Prediction Model

Thanks to the remarkable success of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) techniques, a new possibility for its application on the real-world problem has begun. One of the prominent applications is the bankruptcy prediction model as it is often used as a basic knowledge base for credit scoring models in the financial industry. As a result, there has been extensive research on how to improve the prediction accuracy of the model. However, despite its impressive performance, it is difficult to implement machine learning (ML)-based models due to its intrinsic trait of obscurity, especially when the field requires or values an explanation about the result obtained by the model. The financial domain is one of the areas where explanation matters to stakeholders such as domain experts and customers. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to incorporate financial domain knowledge into local rule generation to provide explanations for the bankruptcy prediction model at instance level. The result shows the proposed method successfully selects and classifies the extracted rules based on the feasibility and information they convey to the users.