Category | Recommendation Engine

I am happy to announce that the Smart Peer Lending Loan Recommendations Newsletter is now available. Each morning our loan recommendations engine scans the new loans open for new investment on Lending Club and passes them through our proprietary selection criteria. Loans that pass are emailed out to subscribers in a format that makes investing simple and fast. Its the same information presented on our Recommendations pages. But each Newsletter includes

After a significant amount of research, development and testing, results of the default prediction algorithm are now publicly available in the form of Lending Club loan recommendations. This post will discuss how the recommendations are constructed and how I use them to keep my portfolio fully invested with the best loans available. Recommendation Pages Visiting the Tools page on this site ( Smart Peer Lending Tools

In the last post of this series ( Improving Investment Returns Using Default Prediction ) we saw how a very simple strategy (investing in every high interest rate loan) combined with our default prediction algorithm yields pretty good returns. But how does this compare to a more sophisticated strategy guided by common sense and manual tuning? This post will investigate one specific example. The Challenger

In my last post of this series ( Prediction Algorithm Details ) I went into more depth on the implementation of a default prediction algorithm. In this post I'll put it to the test and see if it can help us improve the return on even the most basic strategy. Lets say someone was seeking the best possible returns and naively invested in the highest interest rate loans

In part 1 of this series ( Can Loan Defaults Be Predicted? ) some of the basic concepts of the approach I am taking to predict defaults were introduced. In this post I'll be covering a few implementation details. The Learning Process The learning process in machine learning starts with a set of data known as the training set. In our case, this

In my last post ( The Problem With Most Investment Strategies ) I discussed a few of the problems associated with manually built static filters used in finding loans for potential investment. At the core, all of them are trying to find loans that achieve a certain return (by targeting an interest rate) and then applying additional filters to remove the loans that may default. But what if we could skip the process