A Clustering Based Classifier Ensemble Approach to Corporate Bankruptcy Prediction

Corporate bankruptcy prediction is an important research direction in finance. Building a robust prediction scheme for bankruptcy can be beneficial to several stakeholders, including management organizations, government and stockholders. Ensemble learning is a well-known technique to improve the predictive performance of classification algorithms by decreasing the generalization error and enhancing the classification accuracy. It has been a well-established technique in bankruptcy prediction to enhance the predictive performance. Diversity plays an essential role in constructing robust ensemble classification schemes. In this paper, a clustering based classifier ensemble approach is presented for corporate bankruptcy prediction. In this scheme, k-means algorithm is utilized to obtain diversified training subsets. Based on the subsets, each base learning algorithms are trained and the predictions of base learning algorithms are combined by a majority voting scheme. In the empirical analysis, four classification algorithms (namely, C4.5 algorithm, k-nearest neighbour algorithm, support vector machines and logistic regression) and three ensemble learning methods (Bagging, AdaBoost and Random Subspace) are evaluated

Comparative Analysis of Building Insurance Prediction Using Some Machine Learning Algorithms

In finance and management, insurance is a product that tends to reduce or eliminate in totality or partially the loss caused due to different risks. Various factors affect house insurance claims, some of which contribute to formulating insurance policies including specific features that the house has. Machine Learning (ML) when brought into the field of insurance would enable seamless formulation of insurance policies with a better performance which will also save time. Various classification algorithms have been used since they have a long history and have also got some modifications for optimum functionality. To illustrate the performance of each of the ML algorithms that we used here, we analyzed an insurance dataset drawn from Zindi Africa competition which is said to be from Olusola Insurance Company in Lagos Nigeria. This study therefore, compares the performance of Logistic Regression (LR), Decision Tree (DT), K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Kernel Support Vector Machine (kSVM), Naïve Bayes (NB), and Random Forest (RF) Regressors on a dataset got from Zindi.africa competition and their performances are checked using not only accuracy and precision metrics but also recall, and F1 score metrics, all displayed on the confusion matrix. The accuracy result shows that logistic regression and Kernel SVM both gave 78% but kSVM outperformed LR in precision with a percentage of 70.8% for kSVM and 64.8% for LR showing that kSVM offered the best result

An empirical study on credit evaluation of SMEs based on detailed loan data

Small and micro-sized Enterprises (SMEs) are an important part of Chinese economic system.The establishment of credit evaluating model of SMEs can effectively help financial intermediaries to reveal credit risk of enterprises and reduce the cost of enterprises information acquisition. Besides it can also serve as a guide to investors which also helps companies with good credit. This thesis conducts an empirical study based on loan data from a Chinese bank of loans granted to SMEs. The study aims to develop a data-driven model that can accurately predict if a given loan has an acceptable risk from the bank’s perspective, or not. Furthermore, we test different methods to deal with the problem of unbalanced class and uncredible sample. Lastly, the importance of variables is analyzed. Remaining Unpaid Principal, Floating Interest Rate, Time Until Maturity Date, Real Interest Rate, Amount of Loan all have significant effects on the final result of the prediction.The main contribution of this study is to build a credit evaluation model of small and micro enterprises, which not only helps commercial banks accurately identify the credit risk of small and micro enterprises, but also helps to overcome creditdifficulties of small and micro enterprises.As pequenas e microempresas constituem uma parte importante do sistema económico chinês. A definição de um modelo de avaliação de crédito para estas empresas pode ajudar os intermediários financeiros a revelarem o risco de crédito das empresas e a reduzirem o custo de aquisição de informação das empresas. Além disso, pode igualmente servir como guia para os investidores, auxiliando também empresas com bom crédito. Na presente tese apresenta-se um estudo empírico baseado em dados de um banco chinês relativos a empréstimos concedidos a pequenas e microempresas. O estudo visa desenvolver um modelo empírico que possa prever com precisão se um determinado empréstimo tem um risco aceitável do ponto de vista do banco, ou não. Além disso, são efetuados testes com diferentes métodos que permitem lidar com os problemas de classes de dados não balanceadas e de amostras que não refletem o problema real a modelar. Finalmente, é analisada a importância relativa das variáveis. O montante da dívida por pagar, a taxa de juro variável, o prazo até a data de vencimento, a taxa de juro real, o montante do empréstimo, todas têm efeitos significativos no resultado final da previsão. O principal contributo deste estudo é, assim, a construção de um modelo de avaliação de crédito que permite apoiar os bancos comerciais a identificarem com precisão o risco de crédito das pequenas e micro empresas e ajudar também estas empresas a superarem as suas dificuldades de crédito