International Development Policy

Within the financial services industry today, most decisions on how to deal with consumers are made automatically by computerized decision making systems. At the heart of these systems lie mathematically derived forecasting models. These use information about people and their past behavior, to predict how people are likely to behave in the future. For example, who is likely to repay a loan, who will respond to a mail shot and the likelihood that someone will claim on their household insurance policy. Decisions about how to treat people are then made on the basis of the predictions calculated by the system. This book provides a stepbystep guide to how the forecasting models used by the worlds leading financial institutions are developed and deployed. It covers all stages involved in the construction of such a model, including project management, data collection, sampling, data preprocessing, model construction, validation, implementation and postimplementation monitoring of the model's performance.