Predicting bankruptcy using neural networks and other classification methods: the influence of variable selection techniques on model accuracy

We evaluate the prediction accuracy of models designed using different classification methods depending on the technique used to select variables, and we study the relationship between the structure of the models and their ability to correctly predict financial failure. We show that a neural network based model using a set of variables selected with a criterion that it is adapted to the network leads to better results than a set chosen with criteria used in the financial literature. We also show that the way in which a set of variables may represent the financial profiles of healthy companies plays a role in Type I error reduction

An academic review: applications of data mining techniques in finance industry

With the development of Internet techniques, data volumes are doubling every two years, faster than predicted by Moore’s Law. Big Data Analytics becomes particularly important for enterprise business. Modern computational technologies will provide effective tools to help understand hugely accumulated data and leverage this information to get insights into the finance industry. In order to get actionable insights into the business, data has become most valuable asset of financial organisations, as there are no physical products in finance industry to manufacture. This is where data mining techniques come to their rescue by allowing access to the right information at the right time. These techniques are used by the finance industry in various areas such as fraud detection, intelligent forecasting, credit rating, loan management, customer profiling, money laundering, marketing and prediction of price movements to name a few. This work aims to survey the research on data mining techniques applied to the finance industry from 2010 to 2015.The review finds that Stock prediction and Credit rating have received most attention of researchers, compared to Loan prediction, Money Laundering and Time Series prediction. Due to the dynamics, uncertainty and variety of data, nonlinear mapping techniques have been deeply studied than linear techniques. Also it has been proved that hybrid methods are more accurate in prediction, closely followed by Neural Network technique. This survey could provide a clue of applications of data mining techniques for finance industry, and a summary of methodologies for researchers in this area. Especially, it could provide a good vision of Data Mining Techniques in computational finance for beginners who want to work in the field of computational finance

Data mining in computational finance

Computational finance is a relatively new discipline whose birth can be traced back to early 1950s. Its major objective is to develop and study practical models focusing on techniques that apply directly to financial analyses. The large number of decisions and computationally intensive problems involved in this discipline make data mining and machine learning models an integral part to improve, automate, and expand the current processes. One of the objectives of this research is to present a state-of-the-art of the data mining and machine learning techniques applied in the core areas of computational finance. Next, detailed analysis of public and private finance datasets is performed in an attempt to find interesting facts from data and draw conclusions regarding the usefulness of features within the datasets. Credit risk evaluation is one of the crucial modern concerns in this field. Credit scoring is essentially a classification problem where models are built using the information about past applicants to categorise new applicants as ‘creditworthy’ or ‘non-creditworthy’. We appraise the performance of a few classical machine learning algorithms for the problem of credit scoring. Typically, credit scoring databases are large and characterised by redundant and irrelevant features, making the classification task more computationally-demanding. Feature selection is the process of selecting an optimal subset of relevant features. We propose an improved information-gain directed wrapper feature selection method using genetic algorithms and successfully evaluate its effectiveness against baseline and generic wrapper methods using three benchmark datasets. One of the tasks of financial analysts is to estimate a company’s worth. In the last piece of work, this study predicts the growth rate for earnings of companies using three machine learning techniques. We employed the technique of lagged features, which allowed varying amounts of recent history to be brought into the prediction task, and transformed the time series forecasting problem into a supervised learning problem. This work was applied on a private time series dataset

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

Three essays on the use of neural networks for financial prediction

The number of studies trying to explain the causes and consequences of the economic and financial crises usually rises considerably after a banking crisis occurs. The dramatic effects of the most recent financial crisis on the real economy around the world call for a better comprehension of previous crises as a way to anticipate future crisis episodes. It is precisely this objective, preventing future crises, the main motivation of this PhD dissertation. We identify two important mechanisms that have failed during the latest years and that are closely related to the onset of the financial crisis: The assessment of the solvency of banks along with the systemic risk over the time, and the detection of the macroeconomic imbalances in some countries, especially in Europe, which made the financial crisis evolve through a sovereign crisis. Our dissertation is made up of three different essays, trying to go a step ahead in the knowledge of these mechanisms.Departamento de Economía Financiera y ContabilidadDoctorado en Economía de la Empres

Towards A Computational Intelligence Framework in Steel Product Quality and Cost Control

Steel is a fundamental raw material for all industries. It can be widely used in vari-ous fields, including construction, bridges, ships, containers, medical devices and cars. However, the production process of iron and steel is very perplexing, which consists of four processes: ironmaking, steelmaking, continuous casting and rolling. It is also extremely complicated to control the quality of steel during the full manufacturing pro-cess. Therefore, the quality control of steel is considered as a huge challenge for the whole steel industry. This thesis studies the quality control, taking the case of Nanjing Iron and Steel Group, and then provides new approaches for quality analysis, manage-ment and control of the industry. At present, Nanjing Iron and Steel Group has established a quality management and control system, which oversees many systems involved in the steel manufacturing. It poses a high statistical requirement for business professionals, resulting in a limited use of the system. A lot of data of quality has been collected in each system. At present, all systems mainly pay attention to the processing and analysis of the data after the manufacturing process, and the quality problems of the products are mainly tested by sampling-experimental method. This method cannot detect product quality or predict in advance the hidden quality issues in a timely manner. In the quality control system, the responsibilities and functions of different information systems involved are intricate. Each information system is merely responsible for storing the data of its corresponding functions. Hence, the data in each information system is relatively isolated, forming a data island. The iron and steel production process belongs to the process industry. The data in multiple information systems can be combined to analyze and predict the quality of products in depth and provide an early warning alert. Therefore, it is necessary to introduce new product quality control methods in the steel industry. With the waves of industry 4.0 and intelligent manufacturing, intelligent technology has also been in-troduced in the field of quality control to improve the competitiveness of the iron and steel enterprises in the industry. Applying intelligent technology can generate accurate quality analysis and optimal prediction results based on the data distributed in the fac-tory and determine the online adjustment of the production process. This not only gives rise to the product quality control, but is also beneficial to in the reduction of product costs. Inspired from this, this paper provide in-depth discussion in three chapters: (1) For scrap steel to be used as raw material, how to use artificial intelligence algorithms to evaluate its quality grade is studied in chapter 3; (2) the probability that the longi-tudinal crack occurs on the surface of continuous casting slab is studied in chapter 4;(3) The prediction of mechanical properties of finished steel plate in chapter 5. All these 3 chapters will serve as the technical support of quality control in iron and steel production

Gene expression programming for Efficient Time-series Financial Forecasting

Stock market prediction is of immense interest to trading companies and buyers due to high profit margins. The majority of successful buying or selling activities occur close to stock price turning trends. This makes the prediction of stock indices and analysis a crucial factor in the determination that whether the stocks will increase or decrease the next day. Additionally, precise prediction of the measure of increase or decrease of stock prices also plays an important role in buying/selling activities. This research presents two core aspects of stock-market prediction. Firstly, it presents a Networkbased Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) methodology to integrate the capabilities of neural networks with that of fuzzy logic. A specialised extension to this technique is known as the genetic programming (GP) and gene expression programming (GEP) to explore and investigate the outcome of the GEP criteria on the stock market price prediction. The research presented in this thesis aims at the modelling and prediction of short-tomedium term stock value fluctuations in the market via genetically tuned stock market parameters. The technique uses hierarchically defined GP and gene-expressionprogramming (GEP) techniques to tune algebraic functions representing the fittest equation for stock market activities. The technology achieves novelty by proposing a fractional adaptive mutation rate Elitism (GEP-FAMR) technique to initiate a balance between varied mutation rates between varied-fitness chromosomes thereby improving prediction accuracy and fitness improvement rate. The methodology is evaluated against five stock market companies with each having its own trading circumstances during the past 20+ years. The proposed GEP/GP methodologies were evaluated based on variable window/population sizes, selection methods, and Elitism, Rank and Roulette selection methods. The Elitism-based approach showed promising results with a low error-rate in the resultant pattern matching with an overall accuracy of 95.96% for short-term 5-day and 95.35% for medium-term 56-day trading periods. The contribution of this research to theory is that it presented a novel evolutionary methodology with modified selection operators for the prediction of stock exchange data via Gene expression programming. The methodology dynamically adapts the mutation rate of different fitness groups in each generation to ensure a diversification II balance between high and low fitness solutions. The GEP-FAMR approach was preferred to Neural and Fuzzy approaches because it can address well-reported problems of over-fitting, algorithmic black-boxing, and data-snooping issues via GP and GEP algorithmsSaudi Cultural Burea