A Hybrid Machine Learning Framework for Intelligent Loan Approval Prediction

Abstract

Large volumes of loan applications motivate automated decision-support systems that can reduce processing delays and improve consistency while controlling credit risk. This study presents a unified supervised-learning framework comparing XGBoost, Gradient Boosting, and CatBoost for loan approval prediction. The experiments use the Dream Housing Finance dataset containing 614 applications and 12 predictive variables after removing Loan_ID. The pipeline includes missing-value treatment, feature engineering, scaling, SMOTE-based class balancing applied only to training data, and evaluation on a held-out test set of 169 samples. Perfect training performance is treated as a diagnostic warning rather than evidence of generalization. CatBoost achieved the best held-out accuracy (88.17%), precision (88.37%), recall (88.37%), and F1-score (88.37%), with 10 false approvals and 10 false rejections. Confusion-matrix analysis, false-positive and false-negative rates, balanced accuracy, and Wilson confidence intervals indicate the most balanced performance among the evaluated models. The framework is intended as a prototype decision-support approach; larger multi-institutional validation, probability-based discrimination analysis, explainability, calibration, and fairness assessment are required before deployment in real lending environments.