Publication
Title
Bankruptcy prediction for SMEs using relational data
Author
Abstract
Bankruptcy prediction has been a popular and challenging research area for decades. Most prediction models are built using financial figures, stock market data and firm specific variables. We complement such traditional low-dimensional data with high-dimensional data on the company's directors and managers in the prediction models. This information is used to build a network between small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), where two companies are related if they share a director or high-level manager. A smoothed version of the weighted-vote relational neighbour classifier is applied on the network and transforms the relationships between companies into bankruptcy prediction scores, thereby assuming that a company is more likely to file for bankruptcy if one of the related companies in its network has already failed. An ensemble model is built that combines the relational model's output scores with structured data and is applied on two data sets of Belgian and UK SMEs. We find that the relational model gives improved predictions over a simple financial model when detecting the riskiest firms. The largest performance increase is found when the relational and financial data are combined, confirming the complementary nature of both data types.
Language
English
Source (journal)
Decision support systems. - Amsterdam
Publication
Amsterdam : 2017
ISSN
0167-9236
DOI
10.1016/J.DSS.2017.07.004
Volume/pages
102 (2017) , p. 69-81
ISI
000412959200007
Full text (Publisher's DOI)
Full text (open access)
Full text (publisher's version - intranet only)
UAntwerpen
Faculty/Department
Research group
Project info
Social network learning for marketing and finance.
Publication type
Subject
Affiliation
Publications with a UAntwerp address
External links
Web of Science
Record
Identifier
Creation 28.09.2017
Last edited 09.10.2023
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