Classifying Firms’ Performance Using Data Mining Approaches

Superior prediction and classification in determining company’s performance are major concern for practitioners and academic research in providing useful or important information to the shareholders and potential investors for investment decision. Generally, the normal practice to analysed firm’s performance are based on financial indicators reported in the company’s annual report including the balance sheet, income and cash flow statements. In this work, a few popular and important benchmarking machine learning techniques for the data mining including neural networks, support vector machine, rough set theory, discriminant analysis, logistic regression, decision table, sequential minimal optimization and decision tree have been tested as to classify firm’s performance. The data mining techniques produce high classification rate that is more than 92%. This work also has reduced total number of ratios to be evaluated due to long processing time and large processing resources. Finally, the CA/TA, S/TA, E/TA, GM, FC, PBT/TA, and EPS have been considered for of the final reduced financial ratios. The results show that the 7 reduced ratios are comparable as the common 24 ratios. And to the still produce high classification rate and able classify the firm’s performance

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

A Comprehensive Survey on Enterprise Financial Risk Analysis: Problems, Methods, Spotlights and Applications

Enterprise financial risk analysis aims at predicting the enterprises' future financial risk.Due to the wide application, enterprise financial risk analysis has always been a core research issue in finance. Although there are already some valuable and impressive surveys on risk management, these surveys introduce approaches in a relatively isolated way and lack the recent advances in enterprise financial risk analysis. Due to the rapid expansion of the enterprise financial risk analysis, especially from the computer science and big data perspective, it is both necessary and challenging to comprehensively review the relevant studies. This survey attempts to connect and systematize the existing enterprise financial risk researches, as well as to summarize and interpret the mechanisms and the strategies of enterprise financial risk analysis in a comprehensive way, which may help readers have a better understanding of the current research status and ideas. This paper provides a systematic literature review of over 300 articles published on enterprise risk analysis modelling over a 50-year period, 1968 to 2022. We first introduce the formal definition of enterprise risk as well as the related concepts. Then, we categorized the representative works in terms of risk type and summarized the three aspects of risk analysis. Finally, we compared the analysis methods used to model the enterprise financial risk. Our goal is to clarify current cutting-edge research and its possible future directions to model enterprise risk, aiming to fully understand the mechanisms of enterprise risk communication and influence and its application on corporate governance, financial institution and government regulation

Financial crises and bank failures: a review of prediction methods

In this article we analyze financial and economic circumstances associated with the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis and the global financial turmoil that has led to severe crises in many countries. We suggest that the level of cross-border holdings of long-term securities between the United States and the rest of the world may indicate a direct link between the turmoil in the securitized market originated in the United States and that in other countries. We provide a summary of empirical results obtained in several Economics and Operations Research papers that attempt to explain, predict, or suggest remedies for financial crises or banking defaults; we also extensively outline the methodologies used in them. The intent of this article is to promote future empirical research for preventing financial crises.Subprime mortgage ; Financial crises

A Hybrid Technological Innovation Text Mining, Ensemble Learning and Risk Scorecard Approach for Enterprise Credit Risk Assessment

Enterprise credit risk assessment models typically use financial-based information as a predictor variable, relying on backward-looking historical information rather than forward-looking information for risk assessment. We propose a novel hybrid assessment of credit risk that uses technological innovation information as a predictor variable. Text mining techniques are used to extract this information for each enterprise. A combination of random forest and extreme gradient boosting are used for indicator screening, and finally, risk scorecard based on logistic regression is used for credit risk scoring. Our results show that technological innovation indicators obtained through text mining provide valuable information for credit risk assessment, and that the combination of ensemble learning from random forest and extreme gradient boosting combinations with logistic regression models outperforms other traditional methods. The best results achieved 0.9129 area under receiver operating characteristic. In addition, our approach provides meaningful scoring rules for credit risk assessment of technology innovation enterprises

An insight into the experimental design for credit risk and corporate bankruptcy prediction systems

Over the last years, it has been observed an increasing interest of the finance and business communities in any application tool related to the prediction of credit and bankruptcy risk, probably due to the need of more robust decision-making systems capable of managing and analyzing complex data. As a result, plentiful techniques have been developed with the aim of producing accurate prediction models that are able to tackle these issues. However, the design of experiments to assess and compare these models has attracted little attention so far, even though it plays an important role in validating and supporting the theoretical evidence of performance. The experimental design should be done carefully for the results to hold significance; otherwise, it might be a potential source of misleading and contradictory conclusions about the benefits of using a particular prediction system. In this work, we review more than 140 papers published in refereed journals within the period 2000–2013, putting the emphasis on the bases of the experimental design in credit scoring and bankruptcy prediction applications. We provide some caveats and guidelines for the usage of databases, data splitting methods, performance evaluation metrics and hypothesis testing procedures in order to converge on a systematic, consistent validation standard.This work has partially been supported by the Mexican Science and Technology Council (CONACYT-Mexico) through a Postdoctoral Fellowship [223351], the Spanish Ministry of Economy under grant TIN2013-46522-P and the Generalitat Valenciana under grant PROMETEOII/2014/062

Financial crises and bank failures: a review of prediction methods

In this article we provide a summary of empirical results obtained in several economics and operations research papers that attempt to explain, predict, or suggest remedies for financial crises or banking defaults, as well as outlines of the methodologies used. We analyze financial and economic circumstances associated with the US subprime mortgage crisis and the global financial turmoil that has led to severe crises in many countries. The intent of the article is to promote future empirical research that might help to prevent bank failures and financial crises.financial crises; banking failures; operations research; early warning methods; leading indicators; subprime markets

An artificial neural network approach for assigning rating judgements to Italian Small Firms

Based on new regulations of Basel II Accord in 2004, banks and financial nstitutions have now the possibility to develop internal rating systems with the aim of correctly udging financial health status of firms. This study analyses the situation of Italian small firms that are difficult to judge because their economic and financial data are often not available. The intend of this work is to propose a simulation framework to give a rating judgements to firms presenting poor financial information. The model assigns a rating judgement that is a simulated counterpart of that done by Bureau van Dijk-K Finance (BvD). Assigning rating score to small firms with problem of poor availability of financial data is really problematic. Nevertheless, in Italy the majority of firms are small and there is not a law that requires to firms to deposit balance-sheet in a detailed form. For this reason the model proposed in this work is a three-layer framework that allows us to assign ating judgements to small enterprises using simple balance-sheet data.rating judgements, artificial neural networks, feature selection