Combining cluster analysis with classifier ensembles to predict financial distress

The ability to accurately predict business failure is a very important issue in financial decision-making. Incorrect decision-making in financial institutions is very likely to cause financial crises and distress. Bankruptcy prediction and credit scoring are two important problems facing financial decision support. As many related studies develop financial distress models by some machine learning techniques, more advanced machine learning techniques, such as classifier ensembles and hybrid classifiers, have not been fully assessed. The aim of this paper is to develop a novel hybrid financial distress model based on combining the clustering technique and classifier ensembles. In addition, single baseline classifiers, hybrid classifiers, and classifier ensembles are developed for comparisons. In particular, two clustering techniques, Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs) and k-means and three classification techniques, logistic regression, multilayer-perceptron (MLP) neural network, and decision trees, are used to develop these four different types of bankruptcy prediction models. As a result, 21 different models are compared in terms of average prediction accuracy and Type I & II errors. By using five related datasets, combining Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs) with MLP classifier ensembles performs the best, which provides higher predication accuracy and lower Type I & II errors.     

Efficiently processing deterministic approximate aggregation query on massive data

Financial distress prediction is very important to financial institutions who must be able to make critical decisions regarding customer loans. Bankruptcy prediction and credit scoring are the two main aspects considered in financial distress prediction. To assist in this determination, thereby lowering the risk borne by the financial institution, it is necessary to develop effective prediction models for prediction of the likelihood of bankruptcy and estimation of credit risk. A number of financial distress prediction models have been constructed, which utilize various machine learning techniques, such as single classifiers and classifier ensembles, but improving the prediction accuracy is the major research issue. In addition, aside from improving the prediction accuracy, there have been very few studies that specifically consider lowering the Type I error. In practice, Type I errors need to receive careful consideration during model construction because they can affect the cost to the financial institution. In this study, we introduce a classifier ensemble approach designed to reduce the misclassification cost. The outputs produced by multiple classifiers are combined by utilizing the unanimous voting (UV) method to find the final prediction result. Experimental results obtained based on four relevant datasets show that our UV ensemble approach outperforms the baseline single classifiers and classifier ensembles. Specifically, the UV ensemble not only provides relatively good prediction accuracy and minimizes Type I/II errors, but also produces the smallest misclassification cost.     

A novel hybrid credit scoring model based on ensemble feature selection and multilayer ensemble classification

Credit scoring focuses on the development of empirical models to support the financial decision‐making processes of financial institutions and credit industries. It makes use of applicants' historical data and statistical or machine learning techniques to assess the risk associated with an applicant. However, the historical data may consist of redundant and noisy features that affect the performance of credit scoring models. The main focus of this paper is to develop a hybrid model, combining feature selection and a multilayer ensemble classifier framework, to improve the predictive performance of credit scoring. The proposed hybrid credit scoring model is modeled in three phases. The initial phase constitutes preprocessing and assigns ranks and weights to classifiers. In the next phase, the ensemble feature selection approach is applied to the preprocessed dataset. Finally, in the last phase, the dataset with the selected features is used in a multilayer ensemble classifier framework. In addition, a classifier placement algorithm based on the Choquet integral value is designed, as the classifier placement affects the predictive performance of the ensemble framework. The proposed hybrid credit scoring model is validated on real‐world credit scoring datasets, namely, Australian, Japanese, German‐categorical, and German‐numerical datasets.     

A comparative study of classifier ensembles for bankruptcy prediction

The aim of bankruptcy prediction in the areas of data mining and machine learning is to develop an effective model which can provide the higher prediction accuracy. In the prior literature, various classification techniques have been developed and studied, in/with which classifier ensembles by combining multiple classifiers approach have shown their outperformance over many single classifiers. However, in terms of constructing classifier ensembles, there are three critical issues which can affect their performance. The first one is the classification technique actually used/adopted, and the other two are the combination method to combine multiple classifiers and the number of classifiers to be combined, respectively. Since there are limited, relevant studies examining these aforementioned disuses, this paper conducts a comprehensive study of comparing classifier ensembles by three widely used classification techniques including multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural networks, support vector machines (SVM), and decision trees (DT) based on two well-known combination methods including bagging and boosting and different numbers of combined classifiers. Our experimental results by three public datasets show that DT ensembles composed of 80–100 classifiers using the boosting method perform best. The Wilcoxon signed ranked test also demonstrates that DT ensembles by boosting perform significantly different from the other classifier ensembles. Moreover, a further study over a real-world case by a Taiwan bankruptcy dataset was conducted, which also demonstrates the superiority of DT ensembles by boosting over the others.     

基于DESMID-AD动态选择的类别不平衡信用评估模型

针对现实信用评估业务中样本类别不平衡和代价敏感的情况,为降低信用风险评估的误分类损失,提出一种基于DESMID-AD动态选择的信用评估集成模型,根据每一个测试样本的特点动态地选择合适的基分类器对其进行信用预测.为提高模型对信用差客户(小类)的识别能力,在基分类器训练前使用过采样的方法对训练数据作类别平衡,采用元学习的方式基于多个指标进行基分类器的性能评估并在此阶段设计权重机制增强小类的影响.在三个公开信用评估数据集上,以AUC、一型、二型错误率以及误分类代价作为评价指标,与九种信用评估常用模型做比较,证明了该方法在信用评估领域的有效性和可行性.     

An artificial immune classifier for credit scoring analysis

The primary concern of the rating policies for a banking industry is to develop a more objective, accurate and competitive scoring model to avoid losses from potential bad debt. This study proposes an artificial immune classifier based on the artificial immune network (named AINE-based classifier) to evaluate the applicants’ credit scores. Two experimental credit datasets are used to show the accuracy rate of the artificial immune classifier. The ten-fold cross-validation method is applied to evaluate the performance of the classifier. The classifier is compared with other data mining techniques. Experimental results show that for the AINE-based classifier in credit scoring is more competitive than the SVM and hybrid SVM-based classifiers, except the BPN classifier. We further compare our classifier with other three AIS-based classifiers in the benchmark datasets, and show that the AINE-based classifier can rival the AIRS-based classifiers and outperforms the SAIS classifier when the number of attributes and classes increase. Our classifier can provide the credit card issuer with accurate and valuable information of credit scoring analyses to avoid making incorrect decisions that result in the loss of applicants’ bad debt.     

Two-level classifier ensembles for credit risk assessment

Many techniques have been proposed for credit risk assessment, from statistical models to artificial intelligence methods. During the last few years, different approaches to classifier ensembles have successfully been applied to credit scoring problems, demonstrating to be generally more accurate than single prediction models. The present paper goes one step beyond by introducing composite ensembles that jointly use different strategies for diversity induction. Accordingly, the combination of data resampling algorithms (bagging and AdaBoost) and attribute subset selection methods (random subspace and rotation forest) for the construction of composite ensembles is explored with the aim of improving the prediction performance. The experimental results and statistical tests show that this new two-level classifier ensemble constitutes an appropriate solution for credit scoring problems, performing better than the traditional single ensembles and very significantly better than individual classifiers.     

Credit scoring with a data mining approach based on support vector machines

The credit card industry has been growing rapidly recently, and thus huge numbers of consumers’ credit data are collected by the credit department of the bank. The credit scoring manager often evaluates the consumer’s credit with intuitive experience. However, with the support of the credit classification model, the manager can accurately evaluate the applicant’s credit score. Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification is currently an active research area and successfully solves classification problems in many domains. This study used three strategies to construct the hybrid SVM-based credit scoring models to evaluate the applicant’s credit score from the applicant’s input features. Two credit datasets in UCI database are selected as the experimental data to demonstrate the accuracy of the SVM classifier. Compared with neural networks, genetic programming, and decision tree classifiers, the SVM classifier achieved an identical classificatory accuracy with relatively few input features. Additionally, combining genetic algorithms with SVM classifier, the proposed hybrid GA-SVM strategy can simultaneously perform feature selection task and model parameters optimization. Experimental results show that SVM is a promising addition to the existing data mining methods.     

Credit scoring with a data mining approach based on support vector machines

The credit card industry has been growing rapidly recently, and thus huge numbers of consumers’ credit data are collected by the credit department of the bank. The credit scoring manager often evaluates the consumer’s credit with intuitive experience. However, with the support of the credit classification model, the manager can accurately evaluate the applicant’s credit score. Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification is currently an active research area and successfully solves classification problems in many domains. This study used three strategies to construct the hybrid SVM-based credit scoring models to evaluate the applicant’s credit score from the applicant’s input features. Two credit datasets in UCI database are selected as the experimental data to demonstrate the accuracy of the SVM classifier. Compared with neural networks, genetic programming, and decision tree classifiers, the SVM classifier achieved an identical classificatory accuracy with relatively few input features. Additionally, combining genetic algorithms with SVM classifier, the proposed hybrid GA-SVM strategy can simultaneously perform feature selection task and model parameters optimization. Experimental results show that SVM is a promising addition to the existing data mining methods.     

基于朴素贝叶斯分类器的个人信用评估模型

个人信用评估是金融与银行界研究的重要内容。论文研究了三种朴素贝叶斯分类器信用评估模型的精度。在两个真实数据集上用10层交叉验证对朴素贝叶斯信用评估模型进行了测试,并与五种DavidWest的神经网络个人信用评估模型进行了对比。结果表明朴素贝叶斯分类器具有较低的分类误差,在信用评估中有优势。     

A comparative study on base classifiers in ensemble methods for credit scoring

In the last years, the application of artificial intelligence methods on credit risk assessment has meant an improvement over classic methods. Small improvements in the systems about credit scoring and bankruptcy prediction can suppose great profits. Then, any improvement represents a high interest to banks and financial institutions. Recent works show that ensembles of classifiers achieve the better results for this kind of tasks. In this paper, it is extended a previous work about the selection of the best base classifier used in ensembles on credit data sets. It is shown that a very simple base classifier, based on imprecise probabilities and uncertainty measures, attains a better trade-off among some aspects of interest for this type of studies such as accuracy and area under ROC curve (AUC). The AUC measure can be considered as a more appropriate measure in this grounds, where the different type of errors have different costs or consequences. The results shown here present to this simple classifier as an interesting choice to be used as base classifier in ensembles for credit scoring and bankruptcy prediction, proving that not only the individual performance of a classifier is the key point to be selected for an ensemble scheme.     

An experimental comparison of ensemble of classifiers for bankruptcy prediction and credit scoring

In this paper, we investigate the performance of several systems based on ensemble of classifiers for bankruptcy prediction and credit scoring.The obtained results are very encouraging, our results improved the performance obtained using the stand-alone classifiers. We show that the method “Random Subspace” outperforms the other ensemble methods tested in this paper. Moreover, the best stand-alone method is the multi-layer perceptron neural net, while the best method tested in this work is the Random Subspace of Levenberg–Marquardt neural net.In this work, three financial datasets are chosen for the experiments: Australian credit, German credit, and Japanese credit.     

Listed companies’ financial distress prediction based on weighted majority voting combination of multiple classifiers

How to effectively predict financial distress is an important problem in corporate financial management. Though much attention has been paid to financial distress prediction methods based on single classifier, its limitation of uncertainty and benefit of multiple classifier combination for financial distress prediction has also been neglected. This paper puts forward a financial distress prediction method based on weighted majority voting combination of multiple classifiers. The framework of multiple classifier combination system, model of weighted majority voting combination, basic classifiers’ voting weight model and basic classifiers’ selection principles are discussed in detail. Empirical experiment with Chinese listed companies’ real world data indicates that this method can greatly improve the average prediction accuracy and stability, and it is more suitable for financial distress prediction than single classifiers.     

Prediction model building with clustering-launched classification and support vector machines in credit scoring

Recently, credit scoring has become a very important task as credit cards are now widely used by customers. A method that can accurately predict credit scoring is greatly needed and good prediction techniques can help to predict credit more accurately. One powerful classifier, the support vector machine (SVM), was successfully applied to a wide range of domains. In recent years, researchers have applied the SVM-based in the prediction of credit scoring, and the results have been shown it to be effective. In this study, two real world credit datasets in the University of California Irvine Machine Learning Repository were selected. SVM and a new classifier, clustering-launched classification (CLC), were employed to predict the accuracy of credit scoring. The advantages of using CLC are that it can classify data efficiently and only need one parameter needs to be decided. In substance, the results show that CLC is better than SVM. Therefore, CLC is an effective tool to predict credit scoring.     

Least squares support vector machines ensemble models for credit scoring

Due to recent financial crisis and regulatory concerns of Basel II, credit risk assessment is becoming one of the most important topics in the field of financial risk management. Quantitative credit scoring models are widely used tools for credit risk assessment in financial institutions. Although single support vector machines (SVM) have been demonstrated with good performance in classification, a single classifier with a fixed group of training samples and parameters setting may have some kind of inductive bias. One effective way to reduce the bias is ensemble model. In this study, several ensemble models based on least squares support vector machines (LSSVM) are brought forward for credit scoring. The models are tested on two real world datasets and the results show that ensemble strategies can help to improve the performance in some degree and are effective for building credit scoring models.     

Exploring the behaviour of base classifiers in credit scoring ensembles

Many techniques have been proposed for credit risk assessment, from statistical models to artificial intelligence methods. During the last few years, different approaches to classifier ensembles have successfully been applied to credit scoring problems, demonstrating to be more accurate than single prediction models. However, it is still a question what base classifiers should be employed in each ensemble in order to achieve the highest performance. Accordingly, the present paper evaluates the performance of seven individual prediction techniques when used as members of five different ensemble methods. The ultimate aim of this study is to suggest appropriate classifiers for each ensemble approach in the context of credit scoring. The experimental results and statistical tests show that the C4.5 decision tree constitutes the best solution for most ensemble methods, closely followed by the multilayer perceptron neural network and logistic regression, whereas the nearest neighbour and the naive Bayes classifiers appear to be significantly the worst.     

Combining Classifiers with Meta Decision Trees

The paper introduces meta decision trees (MDTs), a novel method for combining multiple classifiers. Instead of giving a prediction, MDT leaves specify which classifier should be used to obtain a prediction. We present an algorithm for learning MDTs based on the C4.5 algorithm for learning ordinary decision trees (ODTs). An extensive experimental evaluation of the new algorithm is performed on twenty-one data sets, combining classifiers generated by five learning algorithms: two algorithms for learning decision trees, a rule learning algorithm, a nearest neighbor algorithm and a naive Bayes algorithm. In terms of performance, stacking with MDTs combines classifiers better than voting and stacking with ODTs. In addition, the MDTs are much more concise than the ODTs and are thus a step towards comprehensible combination of multiple classifiers. MDTs also perform better than several other approaches to stacking.     

A sentiment classification model based on multiple classifiers

With the widespread usage of social networks, forums and blogs, customer reviews emerged as a critical factor for the customers’ purchase decisions. Since the beginning of 2000s, researchers started to focus on these reviews to automatically categorize them into polarity levels such as positive, negative, and neutral. This research problem is known as sentiment classification. The objective of this study is to investigate the potential benefit of multiple classifier systems concept on Turkish sentiment classification problem and propose a novel classification technique. Vote algorithm has been used in conjunction with three classifiers, namely Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Bagging. Parameters of the SVM have been optimized when it was used as an individual classifier. Experimental results showed that multiple classifier systems increase the performance of individual classifiers on Turkish sentiment classification datasets and meta classifiers contribute to the power of these multiple classifier systems. The proposed approach achieved better performance than Naive Bayes, which was reported the best individual classifier for these datasets, and Support Vector Machines. Multiple classifier systems (MCS) is a good approach for sentiment classification, and parameter optimization of individual classifiers must be taken into account while developing MCS-based prediction systems.     

一种基于局部分类精度的多源在线迁移学习算法

近年来,迁移学习得到越来越多的关注.现有的在线迁移学习算法一般从单个源领域迁移知识,然而,当源领域与目标领域相似度较低时,很难进行有效的迁移学习.基于此,提出了一种基于局部分类精度的多源在线迁移学习方法——LC-MSOTL.LC-MSOTL存储多个源领域分类器,计算新到样本与目标领域已有样本之间的距离以及各源领域分类器对其最近邻样本的分类精度,从源领域分类器中挑选局部精度最高的分类器与目标领域分类器加权组合,从而实现多个源领域知识到目标领域的迁移学习.在人工数据集和实际数据集上的实验结果表明,LC-MSOTL能够有效地从多个源领域实现选择性迁移,相对于单源在线迁移学习算法OTL,显示出了更高的分类准确率.