Lending Club offers peer-to-peer (P2P) loans through a technological platform for various personal finance purposes and is today one of the companies that dominate the US P2P lending market. The original dataset is publicly available on Kaggle and corresponds to all the loans issued by Lending Club between 2007 and 2018. The present version of the dataset is for constructing a granting model, that is, a model designed to make decisions on whether to grant a loan based on information available at the time of the loan application. Consequently, our dataset only has a selection of variables from the original one, which are the variables known at the moment the loan request is made. Furthermore, the target variable of a granting model represents the final status of the loan, that are "default" or "fully paid". Thus, we filtered out from the original dataset all the loans in transitory states. Our dataset comprises 1,347,681 records or obligations (approximately 60% of the original) and it was also cleaned for completeness and consistency (less than 1% of our dataset was filtered out).

TARGET VARIABLE

The dataset includes a target variable based on the final resolution of the credit: the default category corresponds to the event charged off and the non-default category to the event fully paid. It does not consider other values in the loan status variable since this variable represents the state of the loan at the end of the considered time window. Thus, there are no loans in transitory states. The original dataset includes the target variable “loan status”, which contains several categories ('Fully Paid', 'Current', 'Charged Off', 'In Grace Period', 'Late (31-120 days)', 'Late (16-30 days)', 'Default'). However, in our dataset, we just consider loans that are either “Fully Paid” or “Default” and transform this variable into a binary variable called “Default”, with a 0 for fully paid loans and a 1 for defaulted loans.

EXPLANATORY VARIABLES

The explanatory variables that we use correspond only to the information available at the time of the application. Variables such as the interest rate, grade, or subgrade are generated by the company as a result of a credit risk assessment process, so they were filtered out from the dataset as they must not be considered in risk models to predict the default in granting of credit.

FULL LIST OF VARIABLES

Loan identification variables:

• id: Loan id (unique identifier). 

• issue_d: Month and year in which the loan was approved.

Quantitative variables:

• revenue: Borrower's self-declared annual income during registration. 

• dti_n: Indebtedness ratio for obligations excluding mortgage. Monthly information. This ratio has been calculated considering the indebtedness of the whole group of applicants. It is estimated as the ratio calculated using the co-borrowers’ total payments on the total debt obligations divided by the co-borrowers’ combined monthly income.

• loan_amnt: Amount of credit requested by the borrower. 

• fico_n: Defined between 300 and 850, reported by Fair Isaac Corporation as a risk measure based on historical credit information reported at the time of application. This value has been calculated as the average of the variables “fico_range_low” and “fico_range_high” in the original dataset.

• experience_c: Binary variable that indicates whether the borrower is new to the entity. This variable is constructed from the credit date of the previous obligation in LC and the credit date of the current obligation; if the difference between dates is positive, it is not considered as a new experience with LC.

Categorical variables:

• emp_length: Categorical variable with the employment length of the borrower (includes the no information category) 

• purpose:  Credit purpose category for the loan request. 

• home_ownership_n: Homeownership status provided by the borrower in the registration process. Categories defined by LC: “mortgage”, “rent”, “own”, “other”, “any”, “none”.  We merged the categories “other”, “any” and “none” as “other”.

• addr_state: Borrower's residence state from the USA. 

• zip_code: Zip code of the borrower's residence.

Textual variables

• title: Title of the credit request description provided by the borrower.

• desc: Description of the credit request provided by the borrower.

We cleaned the textual variables. First, we removed all those descriptions that contained the default description provided by Lending Club on its web form (“Tell your story. What is your loan for?”). Moreover, we removed the prefix “Borrower added on DD/MM/YYYY >” from the descriptions to avoid any temporal background on them. Finally, as these descriptions came from a web form, we substituted all the HTML elements by their character (e.g. “&amp;” was substituted by “&”, “&lt;” was substituted by “<”, etc.).

RELATED WORKS

This dataset has been used in the following academic articles:

• Sanz-Guerrero, M. Arroyo, J. (2024). Credit Risk Meets Large Language Models: Building a Risk Indicator from Loan Descriptions in P2P Lending. arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.16458. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2401.16458
• Ariza-Garzón, M.J., Arroyo, J., Caparrini, A., Segovia-Vargas, M.J. (2020). Explainability of a machine learning granting scoring model in peer-to-peer lending. IEEE Access 8, 64873 - 64890. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2984412