Multimodal Machine Learning for Credit Modeling

Credit ratings are traditionally generated using models that use financial statement data and market data, which is tabular (numeric and categorical). Practitioner and academic models do not include text data. Using an automated approach to combine long-form text from SEC filings with the tabular data, we show how multimodal machine learning using stack ensembling and bagging can generate more accurate rating predictions. This paper demonstrates a methodology to use big data to extend tabular data models, which have been used by the ratings industry for decades, to the class of multimodal machine learning models.