Credit classification is an important component of critical financial decision making tasks such as credit scoring and bankruptcy prediction. Credit classification methods are usually evaluated in terms of their accuracy, interpretability, and computational efficiency. In this paper, we propose an approach for automatic designing of fuzzy rule-based classifiers (FRBCs) from financial data using multi-objective evolutionary optimization algorithms (MOEOAs). Our method generates, in a single experiment, an optimized collection of solutions (financial FRBCs) characterized by various levels of accuracy-interpretability trade-off. In our approach we address the complexity- and semantics-related interpretability issues, we introduce original genetic operators for the classifier's rule base processing, and we implement our ideas in the context of Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II), i.e., one of the presently most advanced MOEOAs. A significant part of the paper is devoted to an extensive comparative analysis of our approach and 24 alternative methods applied to three standard financial benchmark data sets, i.e., Statlog (Australian Credit Approval), Statlog (German Credit Approval), and Credit Approval (also referred to as Japanese Credit) sets available from the UCI repository of machine learning databases (http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml). Several performance measures including accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and some number of interpretability measures are employed in order to evaluate the obtained systems. Our approach significantly outperforms the alternative methods in terms of the interpretability of the obtained financial data classifiers while remaining either competitive or superior in terms of their accuracy and the speed of decision making. 
A multi-objective genetic optimization for fast, fuzzy rule-based credit classification with balanced accuracy and interpretability