Explainable Deep Tabular Learning for Credit Risk Assessment: An Information-Theoretic Cross-Attentional Transformer Approach

Credit risk assessment is a core component of financial decision-making. This study develops an explainable machine learning framework for modeling loan approval decisions on heterogeneous tabular data, centered on a Cross-Attentional Tabular Transformer that applies bidirectional cross-attention between numerical and categorical feature groups. The prediction target is historical loan-approval status, treated as a proxy for, not a direct measure of, borrower default risk; a supplementary validation on a dataset with an authentic default label is also reported. Class imbalance is addressed through focal loss, and post hoc interpretability is provided through SHAP analysis. Three classifiers, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, and the proposed transformer, are evaluated on a 5000-sample credit dataset using accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, ROC-AUC, and average precision. Gradient Boosting achieves the best performance (accuracy 0.9640, F1-score 0.9189), with Random Forest comparable; the proposed transformer reaches 0.9530 accuracy and 0.8949 F1, without surpassing the ensembles and at substantially higher computational cost. A five-split robustness comparison additionally evaluates XGBoost, LightGBM, CatBoost, and calibrated logistic regression: all three Gradient-Boosting variants and both classical ensembles exceed the transformer’s performance on every metric, while calibrated logistic regression does not. The evaluated baseline set excludes deep tabular architectures such as TabNet, FT-Transformer, SAINT, and TabPFN-style methods. Across the three primary classifiers, SHAP identifies credit score, employment status, and income as the dominant features, consistent with domain expectations. The results characterize the observed performance–efficiency trade-off between ensemble methods and attention-based tabular learning under the evaluated data conditions.