Purpose This study aims to assess the default risk of borrowers in peer-to-peer (P2P) online lending platforms. The authors propose a novel default risk classification model based on data cleaning and feature extraction, which increases risk assessment accuracy. Design/methodology/approach The authors use borrower data from the Lending Club and propose the risk assessment model based on low-rank representation (LRR) and discriminant analysis. Firstly, the authors use three LRR models to clean the high-dimensional borrower data by removing outliers and noise, and then the authors adopt a discriminant analysis algorithm to reduce the dimension of the cleaned data. In the dimension-reduced feature space, machine learning classifiers including the k-nearest neighbour, support vector machine and artificial neural network are used to assess and classify default risks. Findings The results reveal significant noise and redundancy in the borrower data. LRR models can effectively clean such data, particularly the two LRR models with local manifold regularisation. In addition, the supervised discriminant analysis model, termed the local Fisher discriminant analysis model, can extract low-dimensional and discriminative features, which further increases the accuracy of the final risk assessment models. Originality/value The originality of this study is that it proposes a novel default risk assessment model, based on data cleaning and feature extraction, for P2P online lending platforms. The proposed approach is innovative and efficient in the P2P online lending field.

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