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To gather together for a better world: understanding and leveraging communities in micro-lending recommendation

Published: 07 April 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Micro-finance organizations provide non-profit lending opportunities to mitigate poverty by financially supporting impoverished, yet skilled entrepreneurs who are in desperate need of an institution that lends to them. In Kiva.org, a widely-used crowd-funded micro-financial service, a vast amount of micro-financial activities are done by lending teams, and thus, understanding their diverse characteristics is crucial in maintaining a healthy micro-finance ecosystem. As the first step for this goal, we model different lending teams by using a maximum-entropy distribution approach based on a wealthy set of heterogeneous information regarding micro-financial transactions available at Kiva. Based on this approach, we achieved a competitive performance in predicting the lending activities for the top 200 teams. Furthermore, we provide deep insight about the characteristics of lending teams by analyzing the resulting team-specific lending models. We found that lending teams are generally more careful in selecting loans by a loan's geo-location, a borrower's gender, a field partner's reliability, etc., when compared to lenders without team affiliations. In addition, we identified interesting lending behaviors of different lending teams based on lenders' background and interest such as their ethnic, religious, linguistic, educational, regional, and occupational aspects. Finally, using our proposed model, we tackled a novel problem of lending team recommendation and showed its promising performance results.

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  1. To gather together for a better world: understanding and leveraging communities in micro-lending recommendation

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        cover image ACM Other conferences
        WWW '14: Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on World wide web
        April 2014
        926 pages
        ISBN:9781450327442
        DOI:10.1145/2566486

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        • IW3C2: International World Wide Web Conference Committee

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        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

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        Published: 07 April 2014

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        Author Tags

        1. community characteristics
        2. heterogeneous feature
        3. maximum entropy distribution
        4. microfinance

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        WWW '14
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        WWW '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 84 of 645 submissions, 13%;
        Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

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        View all
        • (2022)DO FIELD PARTNERS ADD VALUE TO CROWDFUNDED MICROFINANCE? AN INDUSTRY APPROACHJournal of Financial Management, Markets and Institutions10.1142/S2282717X2250007410:02Online publication date: 16-Nov-2022
        • (2022)Personalized Recommendation in P2P Lending Based on Risk-Return Management: A Multi-Objective PerspectiveIEEE Transactions on Big Data10.1109/TBDATA.2020.29934468:4(1141-1154)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2022
        • (2021)A feature interaction learning approach for crowdfunding project recommendationApplied Soft Computing10.1016/j.asoc.2021.107777112(107777)Online publication date: Nov-2021
        • (2020)Voice of Charity: Prospecting the Donation Recurrence & Donor Retention in CrowdfundingIEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering10.1109/TKDE.2019.290619932:8(1652-1665)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2020
        • (2019)Personalized fairness-aware re-ranking for microlendingProceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems10.1145/3298689.3347016(467-471)Online publication date: 10-Sep-2019
        • (2018)Leveraging Implicit Contribution Amounts to Facilitate Microfinancing RequestsProceedings of the Eleventh ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining10.1145/3159652.3159679(477-485)Online publication date: 2-Feb-2018
        • (2018)Tracking and Forecasting Dynamics in Crowdfunding: A Basis-Synthesis Approach2018 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM)10.1109/ICDM.2018.00161(1212-1217)Online publication date: Nov-2018
        • (2017)P2P Lending SurveyACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology10.1145/30788488:6(1-28)Online publication date: 24-Jul-2017
        • (2016)Portfolio Selections in P2P LendingProceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining10.1145/2939672.2939861(2075-2084)Online publication date: 13-Aug-2016
        • (2016)Project Success Prediction in Crowdfunding EnvironmentsProceedings of the Ninth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining10.1145/2835776.2835791(247-256)Online publication date: 8-Feb-2016
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