Support vector machines with optimal instance selection: An application to bankruptcy prediction

Building accurate corporate bankruptcy prediction models has been one of the most important research issues in finance. Recently, support vector machines (SVMs) are popularly applied to bankruptcy prediction because of its many strong points. However, in order to use SVM, a modeler should determine several factors by heuristics, which hinders from obtaining accurate prediction results by using SVM. As a result, some researchers have tried to optimize these factors, especially the feature subset and kernel parameters of SVM But, there have been no studies that have attempted to determine appropriate instance subset of SVM, although it may improve the performance by eliminating distorted cases. Thus in the study, we propose the simultaneous optimization of the instance selection as well as the parameters of a kernel function of SVM by using genetic algorithms (GAs). Experimental results show that our model outperforms not only conventional SVM, but also prior approaches for optimizing SVM.