What is Evolutionary Optimization

The main objective of this chapter is to propose a hybrid evolutionary feature selection approach for solving credit scoring problems subject to constraints. A hybrid scheme combining filter and wrapper-based approaches is proposed to develop an accurate credit scoring model with a high predictive performance. Initially, the minimum redundancy maximum relevance algorithm is applied to find an optimal set of features that is mutually and maximally dissimilar and can represent the response variable effectively, allowing for an ordering of features by their importance. Subsequently, an iterative procedure, where supervised machine learning algorithms such as the logistic regression and the linear-discriminant analysis are combined with an evolutionary optimization algorithm like the genetic algorithm, is applied to choose the feature subset that maximizes an appropriate classification measure according to the predefined features and subject to the predefined constraints. The performance of the proposed method is illustrated using standard credit scoring datasets.