Forecasting corporate failure using ensemble of self-organizing neural networks

For more than a decade, the number of research works that deal with ensemble methods applied to bankruptcy prediction has been increasing. Ensemble techniques present some characteristics that, in most situations, allow them to achieve better forecasts than those estimated with single models. However, the difference between the performance of an ensemble and that of its base classifier but also between that of ensembles themselves, is often low. This is the reason why we studied a way to design an ensemble method that might achieve better forecasts than those calculated with traditional ensembles. It relies on a quantification process of data that characterize the financial situation of a sample of companies using a set of self-organizing neural networks, where each network has two main characteristics: its size is randomly chosen and the variables used to estimate its weights are selected based on a criterion that ensures the fit between the structure of the network and the data used over the learning process. The results of our study show that this technique makes it possible to significantly reduce both the type I and type II errors that can be obtained with conventional methods.