Credit risk assessment plays a critical role in financial risk management, focusing on predicting borrower default to minimize losses and ensure compliance. This study systematically reviews 23 empirical articles published between 2019 and 2023, highlighting the integration of machine learning and optimization techniques, particularly bio-inspired metaheuristics, for feature selection in individual credit risk assessment. These nature-inspired algorithms, derived from biological and ecological processes, align with bio-inspired principles by mimicking natural intelligence to solve complex problems in high-dimensional feature spaces. Unlike prior reviews that adopt broader scopes combining corporate, sovereign, and individual contexts, this work focuses exclusively on methodological strategies for individual credit risk. It categorizes the use of machine learning algorithms, feature selection methods, and metaheuristic optimization techniques, including genetic algorithms, particle swarm optimization, and biogeography-based optimization. To strengthen transparency and comparability, this review also synthesizes classification performance metrics—such as accuracy, AUC, F1-score, and recall—reported across benchmark datasets. Although no unified experimental comparison was conducted due to heterogeneity in study protocols, this structured summary reveals consistent trends in algorithm effectiveness and evaluation practices. The review concludes with practical recommendations and outlines future research directions to improve fairness, scalability, and real-time application in credit risk modeling.

Timely graduation, time-to-degree, and degree completion are key indicators of student progression and institutional effectiveness in higher education. This study presents a PRISMA-based systematic literature review of machine learning approaches for graduation-related prediction, with attention to predictive targets, pipeline components, scalability, and bio-inspired optimization. Searches in Web of Science Core Collection and Scopus identified 278 records, of which 25 studies published between 2021 and 2025 met the eligibility criteria. The findings show that most studies formulated graduation prediction as a supervised classification task, relied heavily on academic performance variables, and frequently used tree-based or ensemble models. Feature selection, explainability, and hyperparameter optimization were commonly reported, but bio-inspired optimization was actively implemented in only two studies through Particle Swarm Optimization, Genetic Algorithms, or Ant Colony Optimization. The evidence base also remains limited in scalability, as most studies used single-institution datasets and provided little external validation. These findings identify an opportunity for Bio-Inspired Educational Analytics through scalable feature selection, efficient hyperparameter optimization, model simplification, and multi-objective trade-off analysis. Future research should evaluate whether lightweight, hybrid, and multi-objective metaheuristics can support accurate, interpretable, fair, and transferable graduation prediction systems.

Bio-inspired metaheuristic optimization offers flexible search mechanisms for high-dimensional predictive problems under operational constraints. In administrative risk prediction settings, class imbalance and feature redundancy challenge conventional learning pipelines. This study evaluates a wrapper-based metaheuristic feature selection framework for post-compliance income declaration prediction using real longitudinal administrative records. The proposed approach integrates swarm-inspired optimization with supervised classifiers under a weighted objective function jointly prioritizing minority-class recall and subset compactness. Robustness is assessed through 31 independent stochastic runs per configuration. The empirical results indicate that performance effects are learner-dependent. For variance-prone classifiers, substantial minority-class recall gains are observed, with recall increasing from 0.284 to 0.849 for k-nearest neighbors and from 0.471 to 0.932 for Random Forest under optimized configurations. For LightGBM, optimized models maintain high recall levels (0.935–0.943 on average) with low dispersion, suggesting representational stabilization and dimensional compression rather than large absolute recall improvements. Optimized subsets retain approximately 16–33 features on average from the original 76-variable space. Within the evaluated experimental protocol, the findings show that metaheuristic-driven wrapper feature selection can reshape predictive representations under class imbalance, enabling simultaneous control of minority-class performance and feature dimensionality. Formal institutional deployment and cross-domain generalization remain subjects for future investigation.

This work presents a novel dataset designed to support predictive modeling of income declaration behavior in the University Credit Solidarity Fund (FSCU) program of Chile. Using institutional records from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, we prepared a structured and anonymized dataset that captures academic, financial, and demographic variables relevant to student loan administration. We describe the data extraction and preprocessing pipeline, including entity modeling, feature engineering, and the creation of a relational database. As a baseline evaluation, we conducted initial experiments using 15 machine learning algorithms via PyCaret, aiming to predict whether a student who previously submitted income declarations would cease to do so. Although no hyperparameter tuning or data balancing was applied, the results offer a solid foundation for future experimentation. Boosting-based classifiers-particularly XGBoost-achieved the best performance, with accuracy and AUC exceeding 96 %. This contribution addresses the lack of publicly available, context-sensitive datasets for modeling conditional repayment schemes in higher education finance. Future work includes dataset publication, class balancing, and explainability analysis.

This study addresses an interpretable supervised binary classification problem under constrained feature availability and class imbalance. The objective is to evaluate whether reliable predictive performance can be achieved using exclusively pre-event administrative variables while preserving transparency and analytical traceability of model decisions. A comparative framework is developed using linear and ensemble-based classifiers, combined with resampling strategies and exhaustive hyperparameter optimization embedded within cross-validation. Model performance is evaluated using standard classification metrics, with particular emphasis on the Matthews correlation coefficient as a robust measure under imbalance. In addition to predictive accuracy, the analysis incorporates global, structural, and local interpretability mechanisms, including permutation feature importance, explicit decision paths derived from tree-based models, and additive local explanations. Experimental results show that optimized ensemble models achieve consistent performance gains over linear baselines while maintaining a balanced error structure across classes. Importantly, the most influential predictors exhibit stable rankings across models and explanation methods, indicating a concentrated and robust discriminative signal within the constrained feature space. The interpretability analysis demonstrates that complex classifiers can be decomposed into verifiable decision rules and locally coherent feature contributions. Overall, the findings confirm that interpretable supervised classification can be reliably conducted under administrative data constraints, providing a reproducible modeling framework that balances predictive performance, error analysis, and explainability in applied mathematical settings.