Assessment of Financial Risk Prediction Models with Multi-criteria Decision Making Methods

A wide range of classification models have been explored for financial risk prediction, but conclusions on which technique behaves better may vary when different performance evaluation measures are employed. Accordingly, this paper proposes the use of multiple criteria decision making tools in order to give a ranking of algorithms. More specifically, the selection of the most appropriate credit risk prediction method is here modeled as a multi-criteria decision making problem that involves a number of performance measures (criteria) and classification techniques (alternatives). An empirical study is carried out to evaluate the performance of ten algorithms over six real-life credit risk data sets. The results reveal that the use of a unique performance measure may lead to unreliable conclusions, whereas this situation can be overcome by the application of multi-criteria decision making techniques

Citizens as consumers: Profiling e-government services' users in Egypt via data mining techniques

This study uses data mining techniques to examine the effect of various demographic, cognitive and psychographic factors on Egyptian citizens' use of e-government services. Data mining uses a broad family of computationally intensive methods that include decision trees, neural networks, rule induction, machine learning and graphic visualization. Three artificial neural network models (multi-layer perceptron neural network [MLP], probabilistic neural network [PNN] and self-organizing maps neural network [SOM]) and three machine learning techniques (classification and regression trees [CART], multivariate adaptive regression splines [MARS], and support vector machines [SVM]) are compared to a standard statistical method (linear discriminant analysis [LDA]). The variable sets considered are sex, age, educational level, e-government services perceived usefulness, ease of use, compatibility, subjective norms, trust, civic mindedness, and attitudes. The study shows how it is possible to identify various dimensions of e-government services usage behavior by uncovering complex patterns in the dataset, and also shows the classification abilities of data mining techniques. © 2013 Elsevier B.V