Predicting Romanian Financial Distressed Companies

The study consisted in collecting financial information for a group of distressed and non-distressed Romanian listed companies during the period 2006–2008, in order to create early warning signals for financial distressed companies using the following methodologies: the Logistic and the Hazard model, the CHAID decision tree model and the Artificial Neural Network model (ANN). For each company a set of 14 financial ratios, that reflect the company’s profitability, solvency, asset utilization, growth ability and size, were calculated and then used in the study. A Principal Component Analysis was also used to reduce the dimensionality of the data space and to allow seeing that the 2 types of companies do form 2 distinct groups suggesting that the ratios used are useful enough to predict financial distress. The following 4 data sets were separately analyzed: first-year data to predict distress one year ahead, second-year data for a 2 year-ahead prediction, third-year data for a 3 year-ahead prediction, as well as cumulative three-year data to predict distress 1 year ahead by letting the ratios vary in time. For each data set, several prediction models were created using CHAID, the Logit and Hazard models as well as the ANN and the hybrid-ANN. The results are consistent with the theory and also to previous studies and the out-of-sample forecast accuracy of the estimated models of 73%-100% indicates that the proposed early warning models for the Romanian listed companies are quite efficient.early warning signals, CHAID, ANN

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

A Robust Regression-Based Stock Exchange Forecasting and Determination of Correlation between Stock Markets

Knowledge-based decision support systems for financial management are an important part of investment plans. Investors are avoiding investing in traditional investment areas such as banks due to low return on investment. The stock exchange is one of the major areas for investment presently. Various non-linear and complex factors affect the stock exchange. A robust stock exchange forecasting system remains an important need. From this line of research, we evaluate the performance of a regression-based model to check the robustness over large datasets. We also evaluate the effect of top stock exchange markets on each other. We evaluate our proposed model on the top 4 stock exchanges—New York, London, NASDAQ and Karachi stock exchange. We also evaluate our model on the top 3 companies—Apple, Microsoft, and Google. A huge (Big Data) historical data is gathered from Yahoo finance consisting of 20 years. Such huge data creates a Big Data problem. The performance of our system is evaluated on a 1-step, 6-step, and 12-step forecast. The experiments show that the proposed system produces excellent results. The results are presented in terms of Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE)