Comparing the Performance of Deep Learning Methods to Predict Companies' Financial Failure

This work was supported in part by the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovacion y Universidades under Project RTI2018-102002-A-I00, in part by the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad under Project TIN2017-85727-C4-2-P and Project PID2020-115570GB-C22, in part by the Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER) and Junta de Andalucia under Project B-TIC-402-UGR18, and in part by the Junta de Andalucia under Project P18-RT-4830.One of the most crucial problems in the eld of business is nancial forecasting. Many companies are interested in forecasting their incoming nancial status in order to adapt to the current nancial and business environment to avoid bankruptcy. In this work, due to the effectiveness of Deep Learning methods with respect to classi cation tasks, we compare the performance of three well-known Deep Learning methods (Long-Short Term Memory, Deep Belief Network and Multilayer Perceptron model of 6 layers) with three bagging ensemble classi ers (Random Forest, Support Vector Machine and K-Nearest Neighbor) and two boosting ensemble classi ers (Adaptive Boosting and Extreme Gradient Boosting) in companies' nancial failure prediction. Because of the inherent nature of the problem addressed, three extremely imbalanced datasets of Spanish, Taiwanese and Polish companies' data have been considered in this study. Thus, ve oversampling balancing techniques, two hybrid balancing techniques (oversamplingundersampling) and one clustering-based balancing technique have been applied to avoid data inconsistency problem. Considering the real nancial data complexity level and type, the results show that the Multilayer Perceptron model of 6 layers, in conjunction with SMOTE-ENN balancing method, yielded the best performance according to the accuracy, recall and type II error metrics. In addition, Long-Short Term Memory and ensemble methods obtained also very good results, outperforming several classi ers used in previous studies with the same datasets.Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovacion y Universidades RTI2018-102002-A-I00Spanish Government TIN2017-85727-C4-2-P PID2020-115570GB-C22European Commission B-TIC-402-UGR18Junta de Andalucia B-TIC-402-UGR18 P18-RT-483

Forecasting Financial Distress With Machine Learning – A Review

Purpose – Evaluate the various academic researches with multiple views on credit risk and artificial intelligence (AI) and their evolution.Theoretical framework – The study is divided as follows: Section 1 introduces the article. Section 2 deals with credit risk and its relationship with computational models and techniques. Section 3 presents the methodology. Section 4 addresses a discussion of the results and challenges on the topic. Finally, section 5 presents the conclusions.Design/methodology/approach – A systematic review of the literature was carried out without defining the time period and using the Web of Science and Scopus database.Findings – The application of computational technology in the scope of credit risk analysis has drawn attention in a unique way. It was found that the demand for identification and introduction of new variables, classifiers and more assertive methods is constant. The effort to improve the interpretation of data and models is intense.Research, Practical & Social implications – It contributes to the verification of the theory, providing information in relation to the most used methods and techniques, it brings a wide analysis to deepen the knowledge of the factors and variables on the theme. It categorizes the lines of research and provides a summary of the literature, which serves as a reference, in addition to suggesting future research.Originality/value – Research in the area of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning is recent and requires attention and investigation, thus, this study contributes to the opening of new views in order to deepen the work on this topic

Predicting financial distress of agriculture companies in EU

The objective of this paper is prediction of financial distress (default of payment or insolvency) of 250 agriculture business companies in EU from which 62 companies defaulted in 2014 with respect to lag of the used attributes. From many types of classification models we chose Logistic regression, Support vector machines method with RBF ANOVA kernel, Decision trees and Adaptive boosting based on decision trees to acquire the best results. From the results it is obvious that with the rising distance to the bankruptcy there drops average accuracy of financial distress prediction and there is a greater difference between active and distressed companies in terms of liquidity, rentability and debt ratios. The Decision trees and Adaptive boosting offer better accuracy for distress prediction than SVM and logit methods, what is comparable to previous studies. From overall of 15 accounting variables, we construct classification trees by Decision trees with inner feature selection method for better vizualization, what reduce full data set only to 1 or 2 attributes: ROA and Long-term debt to Total assets ratio in 2011, ROA and Current ratio in 2012, ROA in 2013 for discrimination of distressed companies.O

Critical factors for insolvency prediction: Towards a theoretical model for the construction industry

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Many construction industry insolvency prediction model (CI-IPM) studies have arbitrarily employed or simply adopted from previous studies different insolvency factors, without justification, leading to poorly performing CI-IPMs. This is due to the absence of a framework for selection of relevant factors. To identify the most important insolvency factors for a high-performance CI-IPM, this study used three approaches. Firstly, systematic review was used to identify all existing factors. Secondly, frequency of factor use and accuracy of models in the reviewed studies were analysed to establish the important factors. Finally, using a questionnaire survey of CI professionals, the importance levels of factors were validated using the Cronbach's alpha reliability coefficient and significant index ranking. The findings show that the important quantitative factors are profitability, liquidity, leverage, management efficiency and cash flow. While important qualitative factors are management/owner characteristics, internal strategy, management decision making, macroeconomic firm characteristics and sustainability. These factors, which align with existing insolvency-related theories, including Porter's five competitive forces and Mintzberg's 5Ps (plan, ploy, pattern, position and perspective) of strategy, were used to develop a theoretical framework. This study contributes to the debate on the need to amalgamate qualitative and quantitative factors to develop a valid CI-IPM

Corporate Bankruptcy Prediction

Bankruptcy prediction is one of the most important research areas in corporate finance. Bankruptcies are an indispensable element of the functioning of the market economy, and at the same time generate significant losses for stakeholders. Hence, this book was established to collect the results of research on the latest trends in predicting the bankruptcy of enterprises. It suggests models developed for different countries using both traditional and more advanced methods. Problems connected with predicting bankruptcy during periods of prosperity and recession, the selection of appropriate explanatory variables, as well as the dynamization of models are presented. The reliability of financial data and the validity of the audit are also referenced. Thus, I hope that this book will inspire you to undertake new research in the field of forecasting the risk of bankruptcy

Machine learning applied to banking supervision a literature review

Guerra, P., & Castelli, M. (2021). Machine learning applied to banking supervision a literature review. Risks, 9(7), 1-24. [136]. https://doi.org/10.3390/risks9070136Machine learning (ML) has revolutionised data analysis over the past decade. Like in-numerous other industries heavily reliant on accurate information, banking supervision stands to benefit greatly from this technological advance. The objective of this review is to provide a compre-hensive walk-through of how the most common ML techniques have been applied to risk assessment in banking, focusing on a supervisory perspective. We searched Google Scholar, Springer Link, and ScienceDirect databases for articles including the search terms “machine learning” and (“bank” or “banking” or “supervision”). No language, date, or Journal filter was applied. Papers were then screened and selected according to their relevance. The final article base consisted of 41 papers and 2 book chapters, 53% of which were published in the top quartile journals in their field. Results are presented in a timeline according to the publication date and categorised by time slots. Credit risk assessment and stress testing are highlighted topics as well as other risk perspectives, with some references to ML application surveys. The most relevant ML techniques encompass k-nearest neigh-bours (KNN), support vector machines (SVM), tree-based models, ensembles, boosting techniques, and artificial neural networks (ANN). Recent trends include developing early warning systems (EWS) for bankruptcy and refining stress testing. One limitation of this study is the paucity of contributions using supervisory data, which justifies the need for additional investigation in this field. However, there is increasing evidence that ML techniques can enhance data analysis and decision making in the banking industry.publishersversionpublishe

Predicting corporate bankruptcy using a self-organizing map: An empirical study to improve the forecasting horizon of a financial failure model

The aim of this study is to show how a Kohonen map can be used to increase the forecasting horizon of a financial failure model. Indeed, most prediction models fail to forecast accurately the occurrence of failure beyond one year, and their accuracy tends to fall as the prediction horizon recedes. So we propose a new way of using a Kohonen map to improve model reliability. Our results demonstrate that the generalization error achieved with a Kohonen map remains stable over the period studied, unlike that of other methods, such as discriminant analysis, logistic regression, neural networks and survival analysis, traditionally used for this kind of task

Predicting bankruptcy in construction business: Traditional model validation and formulation of a new model

When predicting bankruptcy of a company basing on its financial statements, the line of business in which the company is operating plays a significant role in terms of prediction accuracy. This accuracy is particularly crucial to banks and businesses which realise sales mostly on credit. The failure to recognise a client’s or business partner’s financial difficulties or the threat of bankruptcy with sufficient accuracy could lead to significant losses. Bankruptcy prediction models are used for these purposes. Most of the models created have been dedicated to the branch of manufacturing, while the branch of construction is relatively neglected by the mainstream literature. Traditional bankruptcy prediction models cannot be used effectively due to specifics of construction business. The aim of this paper is to test the current accuracies of five selected bankruptcy models in predicting the bankruptcy of construction companies. An additional aim is to create a new model designed specifically for this branch. The research was conducted on the sample of Czech companies. The method of Receiver Operating Characteristic was applied as the measure of accuracy for testing the models. The model created during the course of this research achieved an accuracy higher by 3.6 to 8 percent than the traditional models tested