15 research outputs found
Synergetic Application of Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Models to Credit Granting Decision Problems
Although various algorithms have widely been studied for bankruptcy and credit risk prediction, conclusions regarding the best performing method are divergent when using different performance assessment metrics. As a solution to this problem, the present paper suggests the employment of two well-known multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques by integrating their preference scores, which can constitute a valuable tool for decision-makers and analysts to choose the prediction model(s) more properly. Thus, selection of the most suitable algorithm will be designed as an MCDM problem that consists of a finite number of performance metrics (criteria) and a finite number of classifiers (alternatives). An experimental study will be performed to provide a more comprehensive assessment regarding the behavior of ten classifiers over credit data evaluated with seven different measures, whereas the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) and Preference Ranking Organization METHod for Enrichment of Evaluations (PROMETHEE) techniques will be applied to rank the classifiers. The results demonstrate that evaluating the performance with a unique measure may lead to wrong conclusions, while the MCDM methods may give rise to a more consistent analysis. Furthermore, the use of MCDM methods allows the analysts to weight the significance of each performance metric based on the intrinsic characteristics of a given credit granting decision problem
Prácticas organizativas saludables frente a la violencia en el trabajo. Estudio de su incidencia
Violence at work is a growing problem for organizations. It involves significant costs for the organization, its members and the community. In its various dimensions, organized violence is one of the least investigated. This study provides evidence of the relevance of this dimension has on the development of violent behavior in the workplace. The results indicate that practices an organization implements an impact on levels of violence that occur at work. For the development of healthy organizations, free of violence, the company management must take a holistic approach and look at best practices related to human resource management, with leadership factors or job design
A literature review on the application of evolutionary computing to credit scoring
The last years have seen the development of many credit scoring models for assessing the creditworthiness of loan applicants. Traditional credit scoring methodology has involved the use of statistical and mathematical programming techniques such as discriminant analysis, linear and logistic regression, linear and quadratic programming, or decision trees. However, the importance of credit grant decisions for financial institutions has caused growing interest in using a variety of computational intelligence techniques. This paper concentrates on evolutionary computing, which is viewed as one of the most promising paradigms of computational intelligence. Taking into account the synergistic relationship between the communities of Economics and Computer Science, the aim of this paper is to summarize the most recent developments in the application of evolutionary algorithms to credit scoring by means of a thorough review of scientific articles published during the period 2000–2012.This work has partially been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science under grant TIN2009-14205 and the Generalitat Valenciana under grant PROMETEO/2010/028
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
El cambiante mundo de las organizaciones. Hacia una organización saludable
Nuestro modelo actual de sociedad se halla inmerso en un profundo cambio (re-evolución), que nos está conduciendo hacia un mundo «enredado». Las organizaciones, como subsistemas fundamentales de esa sociedad, tienen el reto de digerir el complejo conjunto de transformaciones que estamos viviendo. Uno de los patrones que están emergiendo en las organizaciones, como respuesta a este proceso de cambio, es el de la «salud en la organización». El desarrollo de este patrón se concreta en el constructo «organizaciones saludables», que se caracterizan por promover y potenciar la sinergia positiva entre su propio crecimiento, el de sus miembros y el de la comunidad. La construcción de este tipo de organizaciones se ha convertido en uno de los desafíos del mundo organizacional y, por ende, de la propia sociedad. Su viabilidad y concreción pueden determinar, en buena medida, el modelo social del futuro a medio y largo plazo. El estado de la cuestión es aún demasiado disperso. Se requiere formular un marco referencial que permita orientar el desarrollo de este tipo de organizaciones; un marco que, a su vez, nos ofrezca una conceptualización adecuada para, posteriormente, plantear el desarrollo progresivo de las configuraciones organizativas que posibiliten la evolución íntegra y holística de la salud de la organización, de sus miembros y de la comunidad. Partiendo de la revisión sistemática de información, el presente trabajo ofrece una primera aproximación configuracional en este camino.Our present model of society is engaged in a profound change (re-evolution) that is directing us towards a «networked world». Organizations, as fundamental
subsystems of this society, have to cope with the challenge of managing the complex transformation frameset we are experiencing.One of the patterns that is emerging in response to this changing process is health
in organization. The development of this pattern draws closer to the construct of healthy organizations, which promote and empower the positive synergy between
their own growth, that of their members and that of the community. Building this type of organization has become one of the challenges of the organizational world and,
therefore, of society itself. A great deal of the future social model in the mid and long term may depend on their feasibility and concreteness.
The state of the art is still too fragmented. A reference framework needs to be formulated that enables these kinds of organization to be developed. The framework
should also conceptualize the organization and then progressively develop organizational configurations that lead to the comprehensive and holistic evolution
of the health of the organization, its members and the community. On the basis of a systematic review of information, the present paper uses a configurational approach to
make an initial proposal
Financial distress prediction using the hybrid associative memory with translation
This paper presents an alternative technique for financial distress prediction systems.
The method is based on a type of neural network, which is called hybrid
associative memory with translation. While many different neural network architectures
have successfully been used to predict credit risk and corporate failure, the
power of associative memories for financial decision-making has not been explored
in any depth as yet. The performance of the hybrid associative memory with translation
is compared to four traditional neural networks, a support vector machine
and a logistic regression model in terms of their prediction capabilities. The experimental
results over nine real-life data sets show that the associative memory here
proposed constitutes an appropriate solution for bankruptcy and credit risk prediction,
performing significantly better than the rest of models under class imbalance
and data overlapping conditions in terms of the true positive rate and the geometric
mean of true positive and true negative rates.This work has partially been supported by the Mexican CONACYT through the Postdoctoral Fellowship Program [232167], the Spanish Ministry of Economy [TIN2013-46522-P], the Generalitat Valenciana [PROMETEOII/2014/062] and the Mexican PRODEP [DSA/103.5/15/7004]. We would like to thank the Reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions, which have helped to improve the quality of this paper substantially
Model Selection for Financial Distress Prediction by Aggregating TOPSIS and PROMETHEE Rankings
Ponencia presentada al 11th International Conference, HAIS 2016, Seville, Spain, April 18-20, 2016Many models have been explored for financial distress prediction, but no consistent conclusions have been drawn on which method shows the best behavior when different performance evaluation measures are employed. Accordingly, this paper proposes the integration of the ranking scores given by two popular multiple-criteria decision-making tools as an important step to help decision makers in selecting the model(s) properly. Selection of the most appropriate prediction method is here shaped as a multiple-criteria decision-making problem that involves a number of performance measures (criteria) and a set of techniques (alternatives). An empirical study is carried out to assess the performance of ten algorithms over six real-life bankruptcy and credit risk databases. The results reveal that the use of a unique performance measure often leads to contradictory conclusions, while the multiple-criteria decision-making techniques may yield a more reliable analysis. Besides, these allow the decision makers to weight the relevance of the individual performance metrics as a function of each particular problem.This work has partially been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy
[TIN2013-46522-P], the Generalitat Valenciana [PROMETEOII/2014/062], the
Mexican PRODEP [DSA/103.5/15/7004] and the Mexican Science and Technology
Council through the Postdoctoral Fellowship Program [232167]
Understanding the apparent superiority of over-sampling through an analysis of local information for class-imbalanced data
Data plays a key role in the design of expert and intelligent systems and therefore, data preprocessing appears to be a critical step to produce high-quality data and build accurate machine learning models. Over the past decades, increasing attention has been paid towards the issue of class imbalance and this is now a research hotspot in a variety of fields. Although the resampling methods, either by under-sampling the majority class or by over-sampling the minority class, stand among the most powerful techniques to face this problem, their strengths and weaknesses have typically been discussed based only on the class imbalance ratio. However, several questions remain open and need further exploration. For instance, the subtle differences in performance between the over- and under-sampling algorithms are still under-comprehended, and we hypothesize that they could be better explained by analyzing the inner structure of the data sets. Consequently, this paper attempts to investigate and illustrate the effects of the resampling methods on the inner structure of a data set by exploiting local neighborhood information, identifying the sample types in both classes and analyzing their distribution in each resampled set. Experimental results indicate that the resampling methods that produce the highest proportion of safe samples and the lowest proportion of unsafe samples correspond to those with the highest overall performance. The significance of this paper lies in the fact that our findings may contribute to gain a better understanding of how these techniques perform on class-imbalanced data and why over-sampling has been reported to be usually more efficient than under-sampling. The outcomes in this study may have impact on both research and practice in the design of expert and intelligent systems since a priori knowledge about the internal structure of the imbalanced data sets could be incorporated to the learning algorithms
Implementation of a project-based learning to the coordination of subjects in the Agrifood and Rural Engineering Bachelor
The Bachelor’s Degree in Agrifood and
Rural Engineering at Universitat Jaume
I of Castelló has implemented in the
second academic year a multidisciplinary project using a Project-Based Learning as
the teaching method. Its final purpose is
the acquisition of skills that should help
the students to cope with their future
career. This teaching-learning system has
been used for three consecutive years
since the degree was firstly implemented.
Once a particular farm is assigned, the
students are organized in groups and
must fulfill their assigned tasks in a
collaborative manner with the final goal
of developing a project on that farm
including viable improvements of the
exploitation, taking into account the
issues related to the different subjects
involved. This work presents the results
obtained along the three years, analyzed
from two different points of view: student
satisfaction and learning outcomes.
Besides, the proposals for improvement
of the weaknesses identified during
the process are presented. The
results show that the used method
has promoted the acquisition of the
competences proposed. Moreover the
multidisciplinary approach has led to
better results in the student performance
than those obtained by students enrolled
in an unidisciplinary project. Although
improvement actions have solved some
of the problems detected, there are still
some weaknesses, mainly related to
team working and tutorials that should
be addressed in the future.El grado de Ingeniería Agroalimentaria y
del Medio Rural de la Universitat Jaume I
de Castelló viene aplicando en su segundo
curso un proyecto multidisciplinar usando el Aprendizaje Basado en
Proyectos como recurso docente en el
que se pretende que los estudiantes
adquieran competencias que les ayuden
a enfrentarse a su futuro profesional. Este
sistema de enseñanza-aprendizaje se ha
llevado a cabo durante los tres cursos que
está implantado el grado. Una vez asignado
un tipo de explotación agrícola concreta y
utilizando las herramientas del trabajo en
equipo, los estudiantes deben ser capaces
de desarrollar un proyecto sobre la
explotación con propuestas de mejora que
sean factibles y que abarquen aspectos
relacionados con las diferentes disciplinas
implicadas, aplicando los conocimientos
adquiridos en éstas. El presente trabajo
incluye los resultados obtenidos durante
los tres años del proyecto desde dos
puntos de vista importantes: la satisfacción
del estudiante y los resultados de
aprendizaje. Además se presentan las
propuestas de mejora aplicadas en cada
curso como respuesta a las debilidades
detectadas durante el proceso. Los
resultados demuestran que el método
utilizado ha favorecido la adquisición de
las competencias propuestas. Además,
el enfoque multidisciplinar ha propiciado
mejores resultados que los alcanzados
por los estudiantes que realizaron trabajos
unidisciplinares. Por otro lado, aunque
las acciones de mejora han permitido
solventar algunos de los problemas
detectados, siguen persistiendo carencias,
sobre todo a nivel de trabajo en equipo y
de tutorización, que se proponen como
mejoras para el futuro
Análisis de la estrategia logística en las redes ínterorganizativas. Una aplicación al distrito industrial cerámico
Este trabajo reúne dos aspectos fundamentales para la competitividad empresarial: Por un lado la gestión logística en la empresa y las implicaciones de la misma en términos de resultados y, por otro lado, la pertenencia de la empresa a los distritos o clusters industriales. La investigación está centrada en el distrito industrial cerámico de Castellón por ser, así lo entendemos, un marco adecuado para el estudio propuesto.
El objetivo general de este trabajo es cubrir el vacío que existe en la literatura estratégica por lo que se refiere a estudios sobre las implicaciones estratégicas de la gestión logística. Éste objetivo general lo hemos concretado en dos objetivos más operativos y específicos. El primero de ellos se ha centrado en la relación entre bases de las elecciones estratégicas, como el benchmarking y el ajuste, y las estrategias logísticas de la empresa y sus prioridades competitivas. El segundo objetivo específico se refiera a la influencia de la elección de una u otra estrategia logística y prioridad competitiva en los resultados logísticos y empresariales. Para la confirmación de nuestros argumentos teóricos, los trabajos empíricos han tenido como objeto de estudio la población de empresas que forman parte del distrito cerámico de Castellón