Prosper is America's first peer-to-peer lending company. The data consisted 81 loan features, including loan basic information (such as Borrower Rate, Loan amount, Loan Status), Pre-loan management infomation (such as borrower credit information, prosper rating and score, borrower income and de) and Post-loan information (such as loan status, principle outstanding) of approximately 112,000 Prosper loans. The dataset can be found here, with feature documentation available here. During my analysis, I also check the Prosper website
I am most interested in how Prosper set the borrower's loan interest rate. In the exploration, I found that there was a strong relationship between the borrower rate of a loan and the borrower's Prosper rating, the relationship is approximately linear. Term is also a important feature, it shows strong correlation with Borrower Rate. Besides those, features such as wether the borrower is homeowner, if income verified, borrower's inquiry and delinquency history all more or less affect the borrower rate.
Outside of the main variables of interest, I found most of the loans are less than 15000$, and are multiples of 500$. There is a abnormal aggregation around 31% borrow rate, most of these loans have amount less than 7500, and have low Prosper ratings. For borrowers with different Prosper Ratings, they have different loan amount ceilings. Follow the timeline, I also found Prosper changed its requirement several times.
For the presentation, I focus on two questions: what are the basic requirements for getting a loan, and what features are related to borrower rate.I start by introducing the Borrow Rate and loan amount variables, then plot the time series features. I find Prosper change its mimimun credit score twices, and raise its minimun and maxium loan amount, those can answer my first question.
Afterwards, I researched the possible features which may affect the borrower rate one by one. I first get the linear relationship between rate and prosper rating, then find a second most important feature, the term. At the last part, I looked into several cerdit related features, those features all effect the final borrower rate base on the rate determined by Prosper Rating.