<![CDATA[Loan eligibility assessment is a crucial element in financial risk mitigation, aiming to minimize potential losses due to bad debts and ensure proper resource distribution. Traditional rule-based approaches have limitations in scalability, risk of subjective bias, and complex data management. The application of Machine Learning (ML) presents a solution with the ability to analyze complex patterns in historical data, although significant challenges such as class imbalance where the number of defaulted borrowers is much smaller than that of current borrowers and missing values in the dataset remain major obstacles. This study evaluates the SMOTE and SMOTE-ENN resampling methods, to address class imbalance, as well as the mean imputation technique to handle missing values. By evaluating boosting algorithms, including Gradient Boosting, XGBoost, LightGBM, AdaBoost, and CatBoost, the results show that the combination of the CatBoost algorithm with the SMOTE-ENN sampling technique provides the highest prediction accuracy of 91.67%. This finding confirms the significant potential of ML in improving the accuracy, efficiency, and fairness of predictions, while making important contributions to the development of data-driven decision-making systems in the financial sector.]]>
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