$\texttt{findr}$: Transparent and Fair Credit Risk Decisions through Semi-Structured Regressions
Victor Medina-Olivares, Stefan Lessmann, Jonathan Crook
Abstract
Credit risk models increasingly need to combine predictive accuracy with transparent explanations and auditable fairness constraints. Logistic regression remains attractive because its coefficients are easy to interpret, but it can miss nonlinear structure. Flexible models can improve prediction, but their explanations are often post-hoc and may not describe the decision rule itself. We introduce $\texttt{findr}$, short for flexible, interpretable deep regression, a semi-structured framework for binary credit risk modelling that decomposes the logit into an interpretable structured component and an orthogonal neural residual. The orthogonalisation separates coefficient-based effects from residual nonlinear variation, while an in-processing Wasserstein penalty mitigates group disparities by comparing score distributions during training. The framework also includes diagnostics that measure the structured component's contribution to logit variation, decision agreement, and local directional consistency. We evaluate $\texttt{findr}$ in a simulation study and on eight public credit datasets using score-level accuracy-fairness frontiers. The results show that $\texttt{findr}$ behaves close to logistic regression when the signal is approximately linear, while recovering much of the predictive gain of neural models when nonlinear structure is relevant. The diagnostics identify when coefficient-based explanations remain close to the full fitted model and when residual variation must also be examined. These findings support semi-structured modelling as a practical way to make performance, fairness, and interpretability trade-offs explicit in credit risk decisions.
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