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Feedzai Data Scientist Interview Questions & Guide 2026

Diagnose a metric move for Feedzai data scientist prep: split by segment, rule out a logging change, separate mix shift from behaviour.

The 60-second brief

A Data Scientist at Feedzai plays a pivotal role in the front lines of financial crime prevention. You are responsible for building and refining sophisticated machine learning models that detect fraud in real-time, protecting global commerce and financial institutions from increasingly complex threats. Your work directly impacts how millions of transactions are processed, requiring a balance of high-level statistical rigor and the ability to deploy scalable, production-ready solutions.

Scope your preparation by the data you would actually touch, because the title will not tell you. A seat that lives in event logs and weekly readouts rewards fluency in aggregation and metric definitions; a seat that owns a model in production rewards fluency in train/serve skew, retraining cadence and drift monitoring. The fastest way to find out which one you are interviewing for is to ask what the team shipped last quarter and what it gets paged about.

Focus areas

  • Report only matured cohorts for loss metrics
  • Read vintage curves, not blended portfolio averages
  • Separate authorization, settlement and dispute outcomes cleanly

Overview

This position is inherently challenging because it deals with high-stakes, unbalanced datasets where the "signal" of fraud is often buried in massive volumes of legitimate activity. You will collaborate closely with engineering and product teams to translate abstract business requirements into technical architectures. Success in this role requires not just technical prowess, but a deep curiosity about how data reveals patterns of human behavior in a dynamic, global environment.

Because Feedzai operates in the high-stakes world of fraud detection, expect your interviewers to prioritize your ability to explain the "why" behind your technical decisions, not just the "how."

The Feedzai interview process

Feedzai candidates report 2 rounds · ≈ 2-4 weeks. The stages below are what candidates describe, not a published process.

Online Technical Assessment

This round decides whether someone can hand you a schema and a question and trust the number that comes back. Correctness under a clock is the bar, not clever syntax. The habit that separates strong from weak answers is checking the grain: after every join, know how many rows you expect and whether the count moved. Most wrong answers in this format are not wrong logic, they are a fan-out from a key that turned out not to be unique, or a filter applied before an aggregate when it belonged after. Say what you expect before you run it.

What to demonstrate

  • Whether your row counts survive each join, and whether you notice on your own when they do not
  • Deliberate handling of rows that fail to match, including whether the question needs an inner join or a left join with the non-matches kept and counted
  • Whether NULLs are treated on purpose, given that a NULL compares equal to nothing and that COUNT of a column skips it
  • Reaching a defensible answer inside the window instead of a refined one after it

How to prepare

  • Take a two-table schema, write a join that fans out on purpose, then fix it by collapsing the many-side to one row per key before joining. Repeat until the fix is reflex rather than recall.
  • Write a funnel as one query and print the distinct user count at each stage, then confirm each stage is a subset of the one above it rather than assuming it
  • Do a few timed runs in a plain text box with no autocomplete and no formatter, since assessment editors often have neither

Deep-Dive Interviews

Because the format is not fixed, prepare the reasoning rather than the ritual. Nearly every version of this round draws on the same underlying material: a design you can defend, a metric you can define exactly, an analysis whose assumptions you can state out loud. Only the wrapper changes, whether that is a take-home, a live case, a deep dive on past work, or a rough estimate on a whiteboard. Answers rehearsed to fit one shape stall the moment the shape differs. Practise naming the assumption behind a number, then saying how much the conclusion moves if that assumption is wrong.

What to demonstrate

  • Whether your justification for a method survives the question 'why not the simpler thing', including when the simpler thing would have worked
  • Precision under pressure: what exactly counts as an active user, a conversion or a success, over what window, with what exclusions
  • Whether you carry an argument through to a recommendation instead of stopping at a list of tradeoffs

How to prepare

  • For each project you plan to mention, write the metric definition in one sentence: numerator, denominator, time window, exclusions. Say it out loud once, because vagueness shows up in speech before it shows up on paper.
  • Rehearse the same project at three lengths: two minutes, ten minutes, and a deep dive on one technical decision. Cutting live is harder than it sounds.
  • For your headline result, write down what would have had to be true for it to be wrong, and how you ruled that out.

Where candidates lose points

Assuming a model is fair because protected attributes are not among its inputs

Postcode, device, tenure, income proxies and even transaction patterns correlate with protected characteristics, so a model can produce a disparate outcome without ever reading the attribute. Credit decisions additionally carry an explainability obligation in many jurisdictions, since a denial has to be accompanied by its principal reasons, which constrains model form and feature engineering rather than being a reporting afterthought. Treating fairness testing and reason-code generation as design constraints from the first model version is far cheaper than retrofitting them to a deployed one.

Recalibrating an underwriting cutoff on approved and funded applicants only

Rejected applicants have no repayment outcome, and they were rejected because the incumbent model scored them badly, so the missingness depends directly on the outcome being modelled. Reject inference by augmentation or parcelling fills the gap using the incumbent model's own assumptions, which means it can confirm those assumptions but cannot test them. The only genuinely new information about the reject region comes from bureau performance on rejects who borrowed elsewhere, or from a deliberately randomised approval band around the cutoff.

Crediting a treatment for regression to the mean

Selecting a group because it is extreme (lowest-engagement users, accounts having their worst month, the bottom decile of a score) moves that group's expected next-period value back toward the average even under no treatment, by exactly as much as the selecting measure is imperfectly correlated with its own later value. Compare against units that met the same selection rule and went untreated, or use two pre-periods so the bounce-back is visible before the intervention starts. A pre-post number on a group chosen for being extreme measures the selection rule, not the treatment.

Accepting a metric definition without asking about the denominator

Pin down the denominator, the eligibility filter and the time window before computing anything: conversion rate per session, per user, per eligible user and per new user are four different numbers with different behaviour. Restate the definition in one sentence and get agreement before you analyse.

Questions & practice

Walk me through a past project where you had to debug a model that was performing poorly in production.

Medium · machine learning and modelling

Approach

  1. Set a baseline first, so any model has something honest to beat.
  2. Pick an evaluation metric that matches the cost of each error type, not a default.
  3. Say how the offline result would be validated online before it is trusted.

Follow-up

  • How would you choose the decision threshold, and who owns that choice?
  • Where could label leakage enter this setup?

Describe the difference between bagging and boosting, and when you would prefer one over the other.

Medium · machine learning and modelling

Approach

  1. Pick an evaluation metric that matches the cost of each error type, not a default.
  2. Set a baseline first, so any model has something honest to beat.
  3. Check what information would not exist at prediction time, and exclude it.

Follow-up

  • Where could label leakage enter this setup?
  • How would you choose the decision threshold, and who owns that choice?

Can you explain the trade-offs between precision and recall in a production environment?

Medium · machine learning and modelling

Approach

  1. Frame the prediction: the label, the moment of prediction, and the action it triggers.
  2. Set a baseline first, so any model has something honest to beat.
  3. Say how the offline result would be validated online before it is trusted.

Follow-up

  • How would you choose the decision threshold, and who owns that choice?
  • Where could label leakage enter this setup?

Build a vintage delinquency table without pivot or unstack

Easy · vintage analysis · cohorts · groupby · cumulative max

fct_loan_performance_monthly gives loan_id, origination_month, months_on_book, days_past_due, charge_off_flag and restructured_flag. Produce a DataFrame with one row per origination_month and columns for months_on_book 0 through 12, each cell holding the share of that vintage's funded loans that had ever reached 90 or more days past due, or charge-off, by that age. You may not use pivot, pivot_table, crosstab or unstack. Cells for ages a cohort has not yet reached must be NaN rather than zero.

Approach

  1. Define the per-row indicator as days_past_due >= 90 or charge_off_flag, then take a cumulative maximum of it per loan ordered by months_on_book, because the metric is reached-by-age-m, not in-that-state-at-age-m.
  2. Deal with restructuring before the cumulative max. Restructuring resets days_past_due, so a restructured loan re-enters at current and, without the cumulative maximum carrying its pre-restructure worst state, reads as a cure.
  3. Fix the denominator once as the count of distinct loan_id per origination_month across the whole cohort. Prepaid and charged-off loans stop producing rows, so a denominator recomputed at each age silently shrinks exactly where losses land.
  4. Aggregate with groupby(['origination_month','months_on_book'])['ever_90'].sum(), then pre-build the output frame indexed by sorted origination months with integer columns 0 to 12 and assign from the grouped Series by .loc on its index.
  5. Mask cells beyond each cohort's maximum observed months_on_book so an immature cell reads NaN instead of an artificially low rate.

Worked solution (30 min)

  1. Sort by loan_id and months_on_book, build the ever_90 indicator, then apply groupby('loan_id')['ever_90'].cummax().
  2. Compute cohort_size as the distinct loan_id count per origination_month, before any filtering on age.
  3. Group the cumulative indicator by origination_month and months_on_book and sum it to get the numerator per cell.
  4. Create the output frame with the sorted origination months as index and range(0, 13) as columns, fill it from the grouped Series, and divide each row by its cohort_size.
  5. Compute each cohort's maximum observed months_on_book and set every cell to the right of it to NaN.

Expected result: A DataFrame with one row per origination_month and columns 0 to 12, values non-decreasing left to right within every row, near zero in column 0, and NaN forming an upper-right triangle where cohorts have not yet aged.

Verify it yourself

  • Every row is non-decreasing across columns; a decrease means the cumulative maximum was not applied or a restructure reset leaked through.
  • The denominator per row equals the cohort's distinct loan count and does not change across columns.
  • Column 0 is at or near zero for every vintage, since a loan cannot be 90 days past due at its first month end.
  • origination_month plus months_on_book is constant along an anti-diagonal, so one anti-diagonal should reproduce a direct calendar-month filter.

Follow-up

  • Two adjacent vintages diverge at months_on_book 6. How would you separate seasoning, mix shift and a genuine credit-quality change?
  • The three most recent vintages look best on this table. What do you check before saying so?
  • How does the table change if charge-off policy moved from 180 to 120 days past due partway through the series?

How do you approach the challenge of "concept drift" in a live fraud detection system?

Medium · sql and data manipulation

Approach

  1. Say which table is the grain you start from, and join outward from it.
  2. Check whether any join is one-to-many before aggregating, or the sums inflate.
  3. State the window function and its partition and ordering out loud before writing it.

Follow-up

  • How does the query change if the join becomes one-to-many?
  • What breaks if events arrive late or out of order?

Customers with no credit application, avoiding the NOT IN trap

Medium · null semantics · anti-join · scd type 2

Count current customers who have never submitted a credit application, broken out by segment. dim_customer is a slowly changing dimension type 2, so restrict to is_current = true, kyc_status = 'verified' and closed_at null. In fct_loan_application, customer_id is null for applicants who were not customers when they applied. Write the anti-join, return segment and customer_count, and state in one line what NOT IN (SELECT customer_id FROM fct_loan_application) returns against this table and why.

Approach

  1. Pin the dimension to one row per customer first: is_current = true already guarantees that, but say so out loud, because forgetting it multiplies every count by the number of attribute versions a customer has accumulated.
  2. Write the anti-join as NOT EXISTS with a correlated predicate on customer_id, which evaluates per row and is unaffected by nulls anywhere in the applications table.
  3. Name the failure explicitly: NOT IN against a nullable column compares each candidate to a set containing NULL, the comparison yields UNKNOWN rather than TRUE, and the whole predicate is therefore never satisfied, so the query returns zero rows.
  4. If NOT IN is required for some reason, add WHERE customer_id IS NOT NULL inside the subquery, which restores the intended semantics, and note that a LEFT JOIN with an IS NULL filter is equally safe.
  5. Group by segment and sanity-check the total against the unfiltered current-customer count minus the count of distinct applying customers.

Worked solution (20 min)

  1. SELECT segment, COUNT(*) FROM dim_customer c WHERE c.is_current AND c.kyc_status = 'verified' AND c.closed_at IS NULL.
  2. Add AND NOT EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM fct_loan_application a WHERE a.customer_id = c.customer_id).
  3. Group by segment and order by the count descending.
  4. Run the NOT IN variant alongside it and record that it returns zero rows, then run it again with IS NOT NULL added to the subquery and confirm the counts match the NOT EXISTS version.

Expected result: One row per segment present in the current dimension (retail, sme, corporate), each with a non-zero customer_count. The NOT EXISTS and the null-guarded NOT IN forms agree exactly; the unguarded NOT IN form returns no rows at all.

Verify it yourself

  • COUNT(DISTINCT customer_id) equals COUNT(*) on the filtered dimension, which confirms is_current really collapsed the type 2 versions.
  • The total across segments plus COUNT(DISTINCT customer_id) from fct_loan_application restricted to current verified open customers equals the full current verified open customer count.
  • Swapping NOT EXISTS for the unguarded NOT IN changes the result from a populated set to an empty one, which is the whole point of the exercise.

Follow-up

  • Rewrite it as a LEFT JOIN with IS NULL and say when you would prefer that form to NOT EXISTS.
  • How does the answer change if you want customers who never applied as of a historical date rather than today?
  • The applications table has 40,000 rows with a null customer_id. What are those rows, and are they a data quality problem or a product fact?

How do you prioritize your work when faced with multiple urgent data requests?

Medium · product sense and metrics

Approach

  1. Name one primary metric, then the guardrail that stops it being gamed.
  2. Fix the population and the time window before naming any metric.
  3. Restate the decision this analysis has to support, and who acts on the answer.

Follow-up

  • Which segment would you cut first, and what would that rule out?
  • How would you detect that the metric is being gamed rather than genuinely improving?

Cut variance on a heavy-tailed settled-volume metric

Medium · cuped · stratification · heavy tails

The primary metric is settled payment volume per customer per month in one reporting currency, randomised by customer_id, computed from fct_payment_authorization rows that are approved, captured and not reversed. The available population powers a minimum detectable effect of 3.0 percent, but the plausible effect is about 1.2 percent. You have eight pre-randomisation weeks of the same metric per customer, and the distribution is heavily right-skewed. Propose a variance-reduction plan, state the estimator and its preconditions, quantify the improvement you expect, and say whether it closes the gap.

Approach

  1. Apply CUPED with the pre-period metric as the covariate. Define Y_adj = Y - theta * (X - Xbar) with theta = Cov(Y, X) / Var(X) estimated on the pooled experiment data. The variance of the adjusted difference is Var(Y) * (1 - rho^2) where rho is the correlation between Y and X, so the entire benefit is determined by rho and nothing else.
  2. Check the precondition that makes the estimator unbiased: X must be measured strictly before assignment. A covariate computed over any window that overlaps the test period absorbs part of the treatment effect and biases the estimate toward zero. Pin the covariate window end date to the randomisation timestamp, not to the analysis date.
  3. Handle customers with no pre-period. Set X to zero plus a no-history indicator, or stratify them as their own cell. Either is valid because the imputation rule is fixed before assignment and does not depend on the arm; what is invalid is imputing with an arm-specific mean.
  4. Attack the skew separately, because CUPED reduces variance but does not make a heavy tail light. Pre-register a winsorisation point such as the 99.5th percentile of the pre-period distribution, state plainly that this changes the estimand from the mean to a capped mean, and report both. Capping at a pre-period quantile rather than a post-period one keeps the cap from depending on the treatment.
  5. Stratify the assignment on pre-period decile crossed with segment, which removes the same variance CUPED does when the covariate is the stratifying variable and additionally guarantees balance rather than achieving it in expectation. Post-stratified analysis is the fallback if assignment is already running.
  6. Pin the currency conversion to a fixed rate table dated at test start. Using settlement_fx_rate as realised injects market movement into the metric, and if the arms have different currency mixes it injects it unequally.

Worked solution (25 min)

  1. Estimate rho on historical data by correlating each customer's eight-week pre-period volume with their following-month volume; assume the answer is 0.62.
  2. Compute the variance multiplier: 1 - rho^2 = 1 - 0.3844 = 0.6156, so the standard error falls by sqrt(0.6156) = 0.785 and the effective sample size rises by 1 / 0.6156 = 1.62.
  3. Apply to the MDE: 3.0 percent * 0.785 = 2.36 percent.
  4. Invert the requirement: reaching 1.2 percent needs a variance multiplier of (1.2 / 3.0)^2 = 0.16, which requires rho = sqrt(1 - 0.16) = 0.92. That correlation is not attainable from an eight-week pre-period on this metric.
  5. Price the remaining shortfall in duration. Variance of the mean falls as 1/n, so the extra exposure needed is the ratio of the variance multipliers taken the right way round: 0.6156 / 0.16 = 3.85. The CUPED-adjusted plan must run about 3.85 times its planned exposure to detect 1.2 percent, holding rho and the traffic mix fixed; put the other way, the plan as written carries only about 26 percent of the sample it needs.

Expected result: At rho = 0.62, CUPED lowers the MDE from 3.0 percent to about 2.36 percent, a 21 percent reduction, and raises effective sample size by 1.62x. It does not reach 1.2 percent; that would need rho of about 0.92. Closing the rest with duration alone takes about 3.85 times the CUPED-adjusted exposure (0.6156 / 0.16), so the plan as written holds roughly 26 percent of the sample required. The correct deliverable states the shortfall and prices that additional duration rather than declaring the test adequately powered.

Verify it yourself

  • The duration factor must come out the same by both routes: 0.6156 / 0.16 = 3.85, and squaring the MDE ratio 2.354 / 1.2 = 1.962 also gives 3.85. A factor below 1 means the ratio has been inverted, since more sample is needed, not less.
  • Run CUPED on an A/A split of historical data: the point estimate must stay centred on zero and the standard error must fall by the predicted factor. If the estimate moves, the covariate is contaminated by post-randomisation data.
  • Regressing Y on X with an arm indicator should give an arm coefficient numerically equal to the CUPED-adjusted difference; the two are the same estimator.
  • Recompute rho within each segment. If the pooled rho is much higher than every within-segment rho, the gain is coming from between-segment variation that stratification already removes and should not be double counted.

Follow-up

  • Your pre-period correlation is 0.62 on existing customers and near zero on customers onboarded in the last month. How do you report a single effect across both groups without the low-correlation group eating the gains?
  • Someone proposes using a post-randomisation covariate that correlates 0.9 with the outcome. Why is that not a better CUPED covariate?
  • If you winsorise, what do you say to a sponsor who points out that the capped customers are the ones the business cares about most?

Trailing thirty day volume per customer drops week over week

Hard · seasonality · day of week · window alignment

The trailing 30-day settled volume per active customer is down 7 percent against the same metric seven days earlier. Nothing shipped. You have fct_payment_authorization with requested_at, channel, captured_at, captured_amount_minor, settled_at, settlement_amount_minor, plus dim_customer with is_current, kyc_status, onboarded_at and closed_at for the active denominator. Before anyone writes a retention narrative, decide how much of the 7 percent is calendar structure, and hand back a calendar-robust version of the comparison.

Approach

  1. Do the window arithmetic first. Thirty days is four whole weeks plus two days, so exactly two weekdays appear five times and the other five appear four times. Sliding the window by seven days changes which two, and card-present and card-not-present volumes differ sharply by weekday.
  2. Rebuild on a 28-day window, which contains exactly four of every weekday, and see how much of the 7 percent survives. That single change removes the weekday composition effect with no modelling and no assumptions.
  3. Count the structural events inside each window: public holidays, and the billing anchor days that recurring authorizations cluster on. A window holding one fewer month boundary loses a block of recurring volume that has nothing to do with customer behaviour.
  4. Decompose by channel, since recurring, card_present and ecommerce have different calendar signatures. A drop concentrated in recurring points at anchor-day placement; one spread evenly across channels does not.
  5. Compare year over year at a 364-day lag rather than 365, which preserves weekday alignment, and only then read the residual.
  6. Check the denominator on its own. Active customer counts on a trailing window carry their own calendar structure, and a ratio can move because either side moved.

Follow-up

  • Which window goes on the executive dashboard, and what do you give up by choosing it?
  • How would you handle a holiday that moves between years, so that a 364-day lag still misaligns it?
  • If a genuine 2 percent residual survives, what is the smallest cut that tells you whether it is breadth or depth?

Suggested practice checklist

Instead of guessing where the week should go, day one measures it under a fixed rubric and allocates the remaining hours in proportion to the gaps. The method is deliberately rigid: the allocation is written down before any studying starts and is not renegotiated when a topic turns out to be unpleasant.

Day 1 — Diagnostic, scored before you study anything

  • Sit a 100-minute timed diagnostic in four blocks: 30 minutes of SQL across three prompts, 25 minutes of short-answer statistics, 25 minutes on one modelling or case prompt, and 20 minutes delivering one behavioural story aloud.
  • Score each block from 0 to 3 on a fixed rubric where 3 is correct and fluent, 2 is correct but slow or prompted, 1 is partially correct, and 0 is stuck, grading the output rather than how the attempt felt.
  • Allocate the hours for days two to five roughly in proportion to 3 minus the score in each block, write the allocation down, and commit to not revising it midweek.

Deliverable: A scored rubric and a fixed hour allocation for the rest of the week.

Day 2 — Largest gap: find the boundary rather than the subject

  • Break the weakest area into five named sub-skills (for query work: grain control, window frames, date arithmetic, set logic with NULLs, and reading a query plan) and rate each one, so the rest of the week targets a sub-skill instead of a subject.
  • Solve three problems chosen to sit just above where the rating drops off, and for each write the first move you failed to make.
  • Re-solve one of them from memory four hours later, on paper, with nothing open.

Deliverable: A five-item sub-skill map with the two blocking sub-skills circled.

Day 3 — Largest gap: drill the blocking sub-skill

  • Do eight short repetitions of the same shape rather than eight different problems, so what you practise is the pattern and not the puzzle.
  • Write the rule you now hold in one sentence, then test it against a case built to break it: a ranking function over a column with ties, or a two-sample test on observations that are obviously dependent.
  • Have someone else read your one-sentence rule and find the precondition you left out.

Deliverable: One rule statement with its preconditions attached and one counterexample that would have caught the incomplete version.

Day 4 — Second gap, plus maintenance on your strongest area

  • Run the same sub-skill map and boundary protocol on the second-largest gap, compressed into half the day.
  • Spend 25 timed minutes on your strongest area to stop it decaying, choosing the hardest problem you can still finish rather than an easy warm-up.
  • Compare how the two areas fail: whether you lose time on recall, on setup, or on arithmetic, because the fix differs for each.

Deliverable: A second sub-skill map plus a one-line diagnosis of how each area fails you.

Day 5 — The gap that is not a skill

  • Record yourself answering one technical and one behavioural prompt, then count two things in the playback: how many seconds before your first clarifying question, and how many sentences you started without knowing where they ended.
  • Rewrite your three most-used stock phrases into shorter versions, and practise saying "I do not know, here is how I would find out" without softening it into a guess.
  • Deliver one answer again with a hard 90-second limit to force structure before detail.

Deliverable: Two recordings with a counted improvement in time-to-first-question.

Day 6 — Retest under day-one conditions

  • Sit the same 100-minute diagnostic structure with new prompts of comparable difficulty and score it on the identical rubric.
  • Compare block by block, and for any block that did not move, change the method rather than adding hours: a block stuck at 1 usually means the practice was too varied, not too short.
  • Write which single block you would still lose the offer on.

Deliverable: A second scored rubric placed next to the first, with one named remaining risk.

Day 7 — Full loop under interview conditions

  • Run a 60-minute mock covering the two blocks that moved least, with an interviewer instructed to interrupt and change direction.
  • Write your recovery script for the moment you go blank: restate the question, state your assumption, name the first thing you would check.
  • Reduce the week to the rule statements you wrote, each with its preconditions attached, then say every one of them out loud without reading it and cut any you cannot state in a single sentence, since a rule you have to reconstruct mid-answer will not survive being interrupted.

Deliverable: A one-page card holding the recovery script and only the rules you could state from memory.

Bring numbers, including the ones you are unsure of

An answer without a quantity is hard to interrogate, so interviewers keep probing until they find one. Come with the baseline, the change, the window it was measured over, and how confident you were. If the effect never got measured, say so and say what you would have measured. Fabricated precision is worse than an honest gap.

Describe a time you had to explain a complex technical concept to a non-technical stakeholder.

Medium · behavioural and stakeholder questions

Approach

  1. Pick a story where you drove the decision, not one where you observed it.
  2. State the situation in two sentences and spend the rest on your reasoning.
  3. Name the disagreement or constraint, and how you resolved it with evidence.

Follow-up

  • How did you know the outcome was caused by your change?
  • What would you do differently if you ran that project again?

How do you handle highly unbalanced datasets in a fraud detection context?

Medium · behavioural and stakeholder questions

Approach

  1. Name the disagreement or constraint, and how you resolved it with evidence.
  2. Pick a story where you drove the decision, not one where you observed it.
  3. State the situation in two sentences and spend the rest on your reasoning.

Follow-up

  • How did you know the outcome was caused by your change?
  • What did you decide not to do, and why?

State honestly what your cutoff change actually contributed

Hard · impact attribution · swap set · counterfactual

Six months ago your recommendation moved a credit cutoff, using fct_loan_application and fct_loan_performance_monthly. Since then approval rate rose four points and the 12-month vintage 90-plus rate on affected cohorts is flat. In the same window the bureau changed a score attribute, marketing shifted channel mix toward broker, and the internal funding rate moved. Your performance review asks for impact in currency terms. Give the number you would stand behind, the counterfactual it rests on, and the part of the observed movement you would not claim.

Approach

  1. Define the counterfactual before computing anything: the claim is not what happened after the change, it is what would have happened had the old cutoff scored the same applications, which means replaying the old threshold on the post-change population.
  2. Build the swap set: applications the new cutoff approves that the old one declined, applications the old one approved that the new one declines, and everyone else held out as unaffected. Only the swap groups carry your effect. Note that the swap-out group has no outcome under the new rule, because those loans were never funded, so its forgone margin must be estimated from matched pre-change approvals rather than observed.
  3. Price each swap group at months_on_book equal to 12 on the measure the cutoff was meant to move: interest and fees collected, minus net charge-offs, minus funding cost at the internal transfer rate.
  4. Strip the confounders explicitly. Cohorts affected by the bureau attribute change are either recomputed on the old attribute or excluded; channel mix is held fixed by reweighting to the pre-change mix; funding cost is charged at the rate in force each month rather than one blended average.
  5. State the residual you will not claim, with its size, and give a range rather than a point wherever cohorts have not yet reached 12 months on book.

Follow-up

  • The swap-in group is only 6 percent of applications. How does that change the way you present the number, and to whom?
  • What would you have needed to set up at launch to make this attribution clean, and why was a randomised band around the cutoff not used?