Bankruptcy prediction using ensemble of autoencoders optimized by genetic algorithm.

The prediction of imminent bankruptcy for a company is important to banks, government agencies, business owners, and different business stakeholders. Bankruptcy is influenced by many global and local aspects, so it can hardly be anticipated without deeper analysis and economic modeling knowledge. To make this problem even more challenging, the available bankruptcy datasets are usually imbalanced since even in times of financial crisis, bankrupt companies constitute only a fraction of all operating businesses. In this article, we propose a novel bankruptcy prediction approach based on a shallow autoencoder ensemble that is optimized by a genetic algorithm. The goal of the autoencoders is to learn the distribution of the majority class: going concern businesses. Then, the bankrupt companies are represented by higher autoencoder reconstruction errors. The choice of the optimal threshold value for the reconstruction error, which is used to differentiate between bankrupt and nonbankrupt companies, is crucial and determines the final classification decision. In our approach, the threshold for each autoencoder is determined by a genetic algorithm. We evaluate the proposed method on four different datasets containing small and medium-sized enterprises. The results show that the autoencoder ensemble is able to identify bankrupt companies with geometric mean scores ranging from 71% to 93.7%, (depending on the industry and evaluation year).

Small- and medium-enterprises bankruptcy dataset.

Bankruptcy prediction is a long-standing issue that receives significant attention of academic researchers and industry practitioners. Most of the papers on bankruptcy prediction focus on companies that are listed on the stock market, and there are only limited data for the rest of the companies. These companies, not indexed at any stock market, represent a significant part of the economy. The presented dataset consists of financial ratios of Slovak companies. There are 21 distinctive financial ratios which are available for three consecutive years prior to evaluation year in which companies may have filed for bankruptcy or not. The companies come from four different industries - agriculture, construction, manufacture, retail. We provide data for four consecutive years 2013-2016 for each industry. All companies are categorized as small-medium enterprises according to EU classification. Prediction performance results on this dataset are published in the research paper "Bankruptcy prediction for small- and medium-sized companies using severely imbalanced datasets" (Zoricák et al., 2019).