{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,1,27]],"date-time":"2026-01-27T23:16:42Z","timestamp":1769555802637,"version":"3.49.0"},"reference-count":38,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"9","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2020,9,4]],"date-time":"2020-09-04T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1599177600000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100004530","name":"Universiti Putra Malaysia","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["Geran Putra-Inisiatif Putra Siswazah"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["Geran Putra-Inisiatif Putra Siswazah"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100004530","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Entropy"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Credit scoring is an important tool used by financial institutions to correctly identify defaulters and non-defaulters. Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Random Forest (RF) are the Artificial Intelligence techniques that have been attracting interest due to their flexibility to account for various data patterns. Both are black-box models which are sensitive to hyperparameter settings. Feature selection can be performed on SVM to enable explanation with the reduced features, whereas feature importance computed by RF can be used for model explanation. The benefits of accuracy and interpretation allow for significant improvement in the area of credit risk and credit scoring. This paper proposes the use of Harmony Search (HS), to form a hybrid HS-SVM to perform feature selection and hyperparameter tuning simultaneously, and a hybrid HS-RF to tune the hyperparameters. A Modified HS (MHS) is also proposed with the main objective to achieve comparable results as the standard HS with a shorter computational time. MHS consists of four main modifications in the standard HS: (i) Elitism selection during memory consideration instead of random selection, (ii) dynamic exploration and exploitation operators in place of the original static operators, (iii) a self-adjusted bandwidth operator, and (iv) inclusion of additional termination criteria to reach faster convergence. Along with parallel computing, MHS effectively reduces the computational time of the proposed hybrid models. The proposed hybrid models are compared with standard statistical models across three different datasets commonly used in credit scoring studies. The computational results show that MHS-RF is most robust in terms of model performance, model explainability and computational time.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/e22090989","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2020,9,4]],"date-time":"2020-09-04T12:20:06Z","timestamp":1599222006000},"page":"989","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":18,"title":["Hybrid Harmony Search\u2013Artificial Intelligence Models in Credit Scoring"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"22","author":[{"given":"Rui Ying","family":"Goh","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Laboratory of Computational Statistics and Operations Research, Institute for Mathematical Research, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Serdang, Selangor 43400, Malaysia"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-6270-1414","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Lai Soon","family":"Lee","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Laboratory of Computational Statistics and Operations Research, Institute for Mathematical Research, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Serdang, Selangor 43400, Malaysia"},{"name":"Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Science, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Serdang, Selangor 43400, Malaysia"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-6877-8498","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Hsin-Vonn","family":"Seow","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Nottingham University Business School, University of Nottingham Malaysia, Semenyih, Selangor 43500, Malaysia"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-5302-8179","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Kathiresan","family":"Gopal","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Laboratory of Computational Statistics and Operations Research, Institute for Mathematical Research, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Serdang, Selangor 43400, Malaysia"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2020,9,4]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"627","DOI":"10.1057\/palgrave.jors.2601545","article-title":"Benchmarking state-of-the-art classification algorithms for credit scoring","volume":"54","author":"Baesens","year":"2003","journal-title":"J. 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