On Credit: Scoring Foundations in the Age of AI
This book traces the mathematical lineage connecting Alan Turing's wartime cryptanalysis to modern credit scoring systems. It reveals how weight of evidence, developed to break enemy codes at Bletchley Park near London in the early 1940s, connects through maximum likelihood and logistic regression to neural networks, ensemble methods, and the explainability frameworks used in today's financial institutions.
Written for data scientists, risk professionals, and students in financial services, the book follows a single thread: the credit assignment problem. Whether allocating credit to loan applicants, attributing predictions to features, or back-propagating errors through neural networks, the fundamental challenge remains the same: fairly assigning credit across contributing factors.