Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

Could Decision Trees Help Improve Farm Service Agency Lending Decisions?, Benjamin P. Foster, Jozef Zurada, Douglas K. Barney

Benjamin Foster

This study examines whether a statistically derived decision tree could serve as a means to improve U.S.A. Farm Service Agency lending decisions. The study is a substantial extension and reanalysis of an earlier work by Barney, Graves and Johnson, (1999). Results indicate that a decision tree could be a valuable tool for Farm Service Agency employees in their lending decisions. The decision tree provides as good or better predictive accuracy than neural networks and logistic regression models at reasonable cutoff levels of Type II to Type I costs of lending. The decision tree also meets the transparency criteria for Farm …