Previous studies targeting accuracy improvement of default models mainly focused on the choice of the explanatory variables and the statistical approach. We alter the focus to the choice of the dependent variable. We particularly explore whether the common practice (in literature) of using...

This study utilizes machine learning techniques, notably classification and regression trees (CART) and support vector regression (SVR), to predict corporate credit ratings. While SVR marginally outperforms in accuracy, CART offers interpretability. However, unconstrained models can produce...