Risk assessment of credit portfolios is of pivotal importance in the banking industry. The bank that has the most accurate view of its credit risk will be the most profitable. One of the main pillars in the assessing credit risk is the estimated probability of default of each counterparty, ie the probability that a counterparty cannot meet its payment obligations in the horizon of one year. A credit rating system takes several characteristics of a counterparty as inputs and assigns this counterparty to a rating class. In essence, this system is a classifier whose classes lie on an ordinal scale.
In this paper we apply linear regression ordinal logistic regression, and support vector machine techniques to the credit rating problem. The latter technique is a relatively new machine learning technique that was originally designed for the two-class problem. We propose two new techniques that incorporate the ordinal character of the credit rating problem into support vector machines. The results of our newly introduced techniques are promising.