Mining social lending motivations for loan project recommendations

Jiaqi Yan, Kaixin Wang, Yi Liu, Kaiquan Xu, Lele Kang, Xi Chen and Hong Zhu
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Jiaqi Yan: NJU - Nanjing University
Kaixin Wang: NJU - Nanjing University
Yi Liu: ESC [Rennes] - ESC Rennes School of Business
Kaiquan Xu: NJU - Nanjing University
Lele Kang: NJU - Nanjing University
Xi Chen: NJU - Nanjing University
Hong Zhu: NJU - Nanjing University

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Abstract: Online social lending has facilitated the ability of borrowers to reach lenders for financing support. With the increasing number of social lending projects, it is becoming very difficult for lenders to find appropriate projects to invest in, and for borrowers to get the funds they need. Project recommendation techniques provide a promising way to solve this problem to some degree, by recommending borrowers' projects to lenders who are able to invest. Unfortunately, current loan project recommendations only explore some structured information to match borrowers and lenders, so they cannot achieve a satisfactory way to solve the problem very well. In this study, we innovatively mine a huge amount of unstructured data, the text data of borrowers' and lenders' motivations, to provide loan project recommendations that solve the problem of mismatches between borrowers and lenders. We present a motivation-based recommendation approach that uses text mining and classifier techniques to identify borrowers' and lenders' motivations. Using a dataset from the well-known social lending platform Kiva, our experiment results show that, compared with prior works, the proposed approach improves project recommendations in inactive lender groups and unpopular loan groups, which shows the superiority of the proposed approach in addressing data sparsity and cold start problems in loan project recommendations. This study thus initiates an attempt to solve the information overload problem and improve matching between borrowers and lenders through mining big unstructured text data found in a large number of P2P platforms.

Keywords: Project recommendation; Data analytics; Social lending; Lending motivation; Big data; Text data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-11
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published in Expert Systems with Applications, 2018, 111, pp.100-106

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-01992179

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