Analysis Of The Determinants Of Financial Resilience Among Retiree Customers Using An Explainable Ai (Xai) Approach

Abstract

Financial resilience among high-risk retiree customer segments is a crucial issue in credit risk management, particularly because traditional scoring models are often black-box in nature and fail to provide transparent insight into the economic and behavioral factors that influence a borrower's repayment capacity. This research pursues a dual objective: first, to develop a high-performing predictive model for financial resilience classification using ensemble Machine Learning methods, and second, to apply SHAP-based Explainable AI (XAI) techniques to identify and quantify the key determinants of resilience in an accountable manner. The research methodology involved processing data from the Kaggle platform, including stratified sampling and SMOTE oversampling to address class imbalance, along with a performance comparison among Logistic Regression, Random Forest, and XGBoost. The results show that Logistic Regression proved to be the best-performing model on the held-out test set, achieving an AUC of 0.9479 and an F1-Score of 0.7313 for the resilient class. Furthermore, SHAP analysis revealed that the strongest determinants driving financial resilience were the number of prior delinquencies, loan purpose (particularly business-purpose loans), and a low debt-to-income ratio, with credit score also contributing. In practical terms, these findings provide a transparent and humane credit assessment framework, enabling financial institutions to formulate more inclusive yet prudent lending policies by prioritizing customers' actual repayment capacity over age alone.