Equifax And SAS Leverage AI And Deep Learning To Improve Consumer Access To Credit

Today's deep neural networks move vast amounts of data through many layers of hardware and software, each layer coming up with its own representation of the data and passing what it "learned" to the next layer. Artificial intelligence attempts "to make a machine that thinks like a human. Deep neural networks try to solve pretty narrow tasks," says Schabenberger. Relinquishing the quest for human-like intelligence, deep learning has succeeded in vastly expanding the range of narrow tasks machines can learn and perform. "We noticed a couple of years ago," says Peter Maynard, Senior Vice President of Global Analytics at Equifax, "that we were not getting enough statistical lift from our traditional credit scoring methodology." The conventional wisdom in the credit scoring industry at the time was that they must continue to use traditional machine learning approaches such as logistical regression because the results were interpretable, i.e., in compliance with regulation.