Title
Bankruptcy prediction for SMEs using relational data.
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.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1016/j.dss.2017.07.004
Decision Support Systems
Keywords
Field
DocType
Data mining,Relational data,Network analysis,Bankruptcy prediction,SME
Financial ratio,Data mining,Actuarial science,Relational database,Ensemble forecasting,Computer science,Bankruptcy prediction,Bankruptcy,Relational model,Data model,Stock market
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
102
C
0167-9236
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
2
0.36
17
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ellen Tobback1101.33
Tony Bellotti216110.23
Julie Moeyersoms3232.61
Marija Stankova4141.70
David Martens5669.52