• Journal of the Korea Safety Management & Science
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.71-83
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• 2008

Most researches on the corporate credit rating are generally classified into the area of bankruptcy prediction and bond rating. The studies on bankruptcy prediction have focused on improving the performance in binary classification problem, since the criterion variable is categorical, bankrupt or non-bankrupt. The other studies on bond rating have predicted the credit ratings, which was already evaluated by bond rating experts. The financial institute, however, should perform effective loan evaluation and risk management by employing the corporate credit rating model, which is able to determine the credit of corporations. Therefore, in this study we present a medium sized corporate credit rating system by using Artificial Neural Network(ANN) and Analytical Hierarchy Process(AHP). Also, we developed AHP model for credit rating using non-financial information. For the purpose of completed credit rating model, we integrated the ANN and AHP model using both financial information and non-financial information. Finally, the credit ratings of each firm are assigned by the proposed method.

• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.1-20
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• 2007

Most researches on the corporate credit rating are generally classified into the area of bankruptcy prediction and bond rating. The studies on bankruptcy prediction have focused on improving the performance in binary classification problem, since the criterion variable is categorical, bankrupt or non-bankrupt. The other studies on bond rating have predicted the credit ratings, which was already evaluated by bond rating experts. The financial institute, however, should perform effective loan evaluation and risk management by employing the corporate credit rating model, which is able to determine the credit of corporations. Therefore, this study presents a corporate credit rating method using business failure probability map(BFPM) and AHP(Analytic Hierarchy Process). The BFPM enables us to rate the credit of corporations according to business failure probability and data distribution or frequency on each credit rating level. Also, we developed AHP model for credit rating using non-financial information. For the purpose of completed credit rating model, we integrated the BFPM and the AHP model using both financial and non-financial information. Finally, the credit ratings of each firm are assigned by our proposed method. This method will be helpful for the loan evaluators of financial institutes to decide more objective and effective credit ratings.

• The Korean Journal of Applied Statistics
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• v.31 no.3
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• pp.367-382
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• 2018

Prediction models for a corporate bond rating in existing studies have been developed using various models such as linear regression, ordered logit, and random forest. Financial characteristics help build prediction models that are expected to be contained in the assigning model of the bond rating agencies. However, the ranges of bond ratings in existing studies vary from 5 to 20 and the prediction models were developed with samples in which the target companies and the observation periods are different. Thus, a simple comparison of the prediction accuracies in each study cannot determine the best prediction model. In order to conduct a fair comparison, this study has collected corporate bond ratings and financial characteristics from 2013 to 2017 and applied prediction models to them. In addition, we applied the elastic-net penalty for the linear regression, the ordered logit, and the ordered probit. Our comparison shows that data-driven variable selection using the elastic-net improves prediction accuracy in each corresponding model, and that the random forest is the most appropriate model in terms of prediction accuracy, which obtains 69.6% accuracy of the exact rating prediction on average from the 5-fold cross validation.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.157-178
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• 2009

Corporate credit rating is a very important factor in the market for corporate debt. Information concerning corporate operations is often disseminated to market participants through the changes in credit ratings that are published by professional rating agencies, such as Standard and Poor's (S&P) and Moody's Investor Service. Since these agencies generally require a large fee for the service, and the periodically provided ratings sometimes do not reflect the default risk of the company at the time, it may be advantageous for bond-market participants to be able to classify credit ratings before the agencies actually publish them. As a result, it is very important for companies (especially, financial companies) to develop a proper model of credit rating. From a technical perspective, the credit rating constitutes a typical, multiclass, classification problem because rating agencies generally have ten or more categories of ratings. For example, S&P's ratings range from AAA for the highest-quality bonds to D for the lowest-quality bonds. The professional rating agencies emphasize the importance of analysts' subjective judgments in the determination of credit ratings. However, in practice, a mathematical model that uses the financial variables of companies plays an important role in determining credit ratings, since it is convenient to apply and cost efficient. These financial variables include the ratios that represent a company's leverage status, liquidity status, and profitability status. Several statistical and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques have been applied as tools for predicting credit ratings. Among them, artificial neural networks are most prevalent in the area of finance because of their broad applicability to many business problems and their preeminent ability to adapt. However, artificial neural networks also have many defects, including the difficulty in determining the values of the control parameters and the number of processing elements in the layer as well as the risk of over-fitting. Of late, because of their robustness and high accuracy, support vector machines (SVMs) have become popular as a solution for problems with generating accurate prediction. An SVM's solution may be globally optimal because SVMs seek to minimize structural risk. On the other hand, artificial neural network models may tend to find locally optimal solutions because they seek to minimize empirical risk. In addition, no parameters need to be tuned in SVMs, barring the upper bound for non-separable cases in linear SVMs. Since SVMs were originally devised for binary classification, however they are not intrinsically geared for multiclass classifications as in credit ratings. Thus, researchers have tried to extend the original SVM to multiclass classification. Hitherto, a variety of techniques to extend standard SVMs to multiclass SVMs (MSVMs) has been proposed in the literature Only a few types of MSVM are, however, tested using prior studies that apply MSVMs to credit ratings studies. In this study, we examined six different techniques of MSVMs: (1) One-Against-One, (2) One-Against-AIL (3) DAGSVM, (4) ECOC, (5) Method of Weston and Watkins, and (6) Method of Crammer and Singer. In addition, we examined the prediction accuracy of some modified version of conventional MSVM techniques. To find the most appropriate technique of MSVMs for corporate bond rating, we applied all the techniques of MSVMs to a real-world case of credit rating in Korea. The best application is in corporate bond rating, which is the most frequently studied area of credit rating for specific debt issues or other financial obligations. For our study the research data were collected from National Information and Credit Evaluation, Inc., a major bond-rating company in Korea. The data set is comprised of the bond-ratings for the year 2002 and various financial variables for 1,295 companies from the manufacturing industry in Korea. We compared the results of these techniques with one another, and with those of traditional methods for credit ratings, such as multiple discriminant analysis (MDA), multinomial logistic regression (MLOGIT), and artificial neural networks (ANNs). As a result, we found that DAGSVM with an ordered list was the best approach for the prediction of bond rating. In addition, we found that the modified version of ECOC approach can yield higher prediction accuracy for the cases showing clear patterns.

• Proceedings of the Korea Inteligent Information System Society Conference
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• 2005.11a
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• pp.571-578
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• 2005

Corporate credit rating analysis has drawn a lot of research interests in previous studies, and recent studies have shown that machine learning techniques achieved better performance than traditional statistical ones. This paper applies support vector machines (SVMs) to the corporate credit rating problem in an attempt to suggest a new model with better explanatory power and stability. To serve this purpose, the researcher uses a grid-search technique using 5-fold cross-validation to find out the optimal parameter values of kernel function of SVM. In addition, to evaluate the prediction accuracy of SVM, the researcher compares its performance with those of multiple discriminant analysis (MDA), case-based reasoning (CBR), and three-layer fully connected back-propagation neural networks (BPNs). The experiment results show that SVM outperforms the other methods.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.29-45
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• 2012

Bond rating is regarded as an important event for measuring financial risk of companies and for determining the investment returns of investors. As a result, it has been a popular research topic for researchers to predict companies' credit ratings by applying statistical and machine learning techniques. The statistical techniques, including multiple regression, multiple discriminant analysis (MDA), logistic models (LOGIT), and probit analysis, have been traditionally used in bond rating. However, one major drawback is that it should be based on strict assumptions. Such strict assumptions include linearity, normality, independence among predictor variables and pre-existing functional forms relating the criterion variablesand the predictor variables. Those strict assumptions of traditional statistics have limited their application to the real world. Machine learning techniques also used in bond rating prediction models include decision trees (DT), neural networks (NN), and Support Vector Machine (SVM). Especially, SVM is recognized as a new and promising classification and regression analysis method. SVM learns a separating hyperplane that can maximize the margin between two categories. SVM is simple enough to be analyzed mathematical, and leads to high performance in practical applications. SVM implements the structuralrisk minimization principle and searches to minimize an upper bound of the generalization error. In addition, the solution of SVM may be a global optimum and thus, overfitting is unlikely to occur with SVM. In addition, SVM does not require too many data sample for training since it builds prediction models by only using some representative sample near the boundaries called support vectors. A number of experimental researches have indicated that SVM has been successfully applied in a variety of pattern recognition fields. However, there are three major drawbacks that can be potential causes for degrading SVM's performance. First, SVM is originally proposed for solving binary-class classification problems. Methods for combining SVMs for multi-class classification such as One-Against-One, One-Against-All have been proposed, but they do not improve the performance in multi-class classification problem as much as SVM for binary-class classification. Second, approximation algorithms (e.g. decomposition methods, sequential minimal optimization algorithm) could be used for effective multi-class computation to reduce computation time, but it could deteriorate classification performance. Third, the difficulty in multi-class prediction problems is in data imbalance problem that can occur when the number of instances in one class greatly outnumbers the number of instances in the other class. Such data sets often cause a default classifier to be built due to skewed boundary and thus the reduction in the classification accuracy of such a classifier. SVM ensemble learning is one of machine learning methods to cope with the above drawbacks. Ensemble learning is a method for improving the performance of classification and prediction algorithms. AdaBoost is one of the widely used ensemble learning techniques. It constructs a composite classifier by sequentially training classifiers while increasing weight on the misclassified observations through iterations. The observations that are incorrectly predicted by previous classifiers are chosen more often than examples that are correctly predicted. Thus Boosting attempts to produce new classifiers that are better able to predict examples for which the current ensemble's performance is poor. In this way, it can reinforce the training of the misclassified observations of the minority class. This paper proposes a multiclass Geometric Mean-based Boosting (MGM-Boost) to resolve multiclass prediction problem. Since MGM-Boost introduces the notion of geometric mean into AdaBoost, it can perform learning process considering the geometric mean-based accuracy and errors of multiclass. This study applies MGM-Boost to the real-world bond rating case for Korean companies to examine the feasibility of MGM-Boost. 10-fold cross validations for threetimes with different random seeds are performed in order to ensure that the comparison among three different classifiers does not happen by chance. For each of 10-fold cross validation, the entire data set is first partitioned into tenequal-sized sets, and then each set is in turn used as the test set while the classifier trains on the other nine sets. That is, cross-validated folds have been tested independently of each algorithm. Through these steps, we have obtained the results for classifiers on each of the 30 experiments. In the comparison of arithmetic mean-based prediction accuracy between individual classifiers, MGM-Boost (52.95%) shows higher prediction accuracy than both AdaBoost (51.69%) and SVM (49.47%). MGM-Boost (28.12%) also shows the higher prediction accuracy than AdaBoost (24.65%) and SVM (15.42%)in terms of geometric mean-based prediction accuracy. T-test is used to examine whether the performance of each classifiers for 30 folds is significantly different. The results indicate that performance of MGM-Boost is significantly different from AdaBoost and SVM classifiers at 1% level. These results mean that MGM-Boost can provide robust and stable solutions to multi-classproblems such as bond rating.

• Journal of the Korean Operations Research and Management Science Society
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• v.32 no.1
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• pp.61-75
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• 2007

The purpose of this paper is to develop a new group classification method based on genetic algorithm and to com-pare its prediction performance with those of existing methods in the area of bond rating. To serve this purpose, we conduct various experiments with pilot and general models. Specifically, we first conduct experiments employing two pilot models : the one searching for the cluster center of each group and the other one searching for both the cluster center and the attribute weights in order to maximize classification accuracy. The results from the pilot experiments show that the performance of the latter in terms of classification accuracy ratio is higher than that of the former which provides the rationale of searching for both the cluster center of each group and the attribute weights to improve classification accuracy. With this lesson in mind, we design two generalized models employing genetic algorithm : the one is to maximize the classification accuracy and the other one is to minimize the total misclassification cost. We compare the performance of these two models with those of existing statistical and artificial intelligent models such as MDA, ANN, and Decision Tree, and conclude that the genetic algorithm-based group classification method that we propose in this paper significantly outperforms the other methods in respect of classification accuracy ratio as well as misclassification cost.

• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.241-265
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• 2020

Purpose Various machine learning techniques are used to implement for predicting corporate credit. However, previous research doesn't utilize time series input features and has a limited prediction timing. Furthermore, in the case of corporate bond credit rating forecast, corporate sample is limited because only large companies are selected for corporate bond credit rating. To address limitations of prior research, this study attempts to implement a predictive model with more sample companies, which can adjust the forecasting point at the present time by using the credit score information and corporate information in time series. Design/methodology/approach To implement this forecasting model, this study uses the sample of 2,191 companies with KIS credit scores for 18 years from 2000 to 2017. For improving the performance of the predictive model, various financial and non-financial features are applied as input variables in a time series through a sliding window technique. In addition, this research also tests various machine learning techniques that were traditionally used to increase the validity of analysis results, and the deep learning technique that is being actively researched of late. Findings RNN-based stateful LSTM model shows good performance in credit rating prediction. By extending the forecasting time point, we find how the performance of the predictive model changes over time and evaluate the feature groups in the short and long terms. In comparison with other studies, the results of 5 classification prediction through label reclassification show good performance relatively. In addition, about 90% accuracy is found in the bad credit forecasts.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.161-177
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• 2014

Corporate credit rating assessment consists of complicated processes in which various factors describing a company are taken into consideration. Such assessment is known to be very expensive since domain experts should be employed to assess the ratings. As a result, the data-driven corporate credit rating prediction using statistical and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques has received considerable attention from researchers and practitioners. In particular, statistical methods such as multiple discriminant analysis (MDA) and multinomial logistic regression analysis (MLOGIT), and AI methods including case-based reasoning (CBR), artificial neural network (ANN), and multiclass support vector machine (MSVM) have been applied to corporate credit rating.2) Among them, MSVM has recently become popular because of its robustness and high prediction accuracy. In this study, we propose a novel optimized MSVM model, and appy it to corporate credit rating prediction in order to enhance the accuracy. Our model, named 'GAMSVM (Genetic Algorithm-optimized Multiclass Support Vector Machine),' is designed to simultaneously optimize the kernel parameters and the feature subset selection. Prior studies like Lorena and de Carvalho (2008), and Chatterjee (2013) show that proper kernel parameters may improve the performance of MSVMs. Also, the results from the studies such as Shieh and Yang (2008) and Chatterjee (2013) imply that appropriate feature selection may lead to higher prediction accuracy. Based on these prior studies, we propose to apply GAMSVM to corporate credit rating prediction. As a tool for optimizing the kernel parameters and the feature subset selection, we suggest genetic algorithm (GA). GA is known as an efficient and effective search method that attempts to simulate the biological evolution phenomenon. By applying genetic operations such as selection, crossover, and mutation, it is designed to gradually improve the search results. Especially, mutation operator prevents GA from falling into the local optima, thus we can find the globally optimal or near-optimal solution using it. GA has popularly been applied to search optimal parameters or feature subset selections of AI techniques including MSVM. With these reasons, we also adopt GA as an optimization tool. To empirically validate the usefulness of GAMSVM, we applied it to a real-world case of credit rating in Korea. Our application is in bond rating, which is the most frequently studied area of credit rating for specific debt issues or other financial obligations. The experimental dataset was collected from a large credit rating company in South Korea. It contained 39 financial ratios of 1,295 companies in the manufacturing industry, and their credit ratings. Using various statistical methods including the one-way ANOVA and the stepwise MDA, we selected 14 financial ratios as the candidate independent variables. The dependent variable, i.e. credit rating, was labeled as four classes: 1(A1); 2(A2); 3(A3); 4(B and C). 80 percent of total data for each class was used for training, and remaining 20 percent was used for validation. And, to overcome small sample size, we applied five-fold cross validation to our dataset. In order to examine the competitiveness of the proposed model, we also experimented several comparative models including MDA, MLOGIT, CBR, ANN and MSVM. In case of MSVM, we adopted One-Against-One (OAO) and DAGSVM (Directed Acyclic Graph SVM) approaches because they are known to be the most accurate approaches among various MSVM approaches. GAMSVM was implemented using LIBSVM-an open-source software, and Evolver 5.5-a commercial software enables GA. Other comparative models were experimented using various statistical and AI packages such as SPSS for Windows, Neuroshell, and Microsoft Excel VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). Experimental results showed that the proposed model-GAMSVM-outperformed all the competitive models. In addition, the model was found to use less independent variables, but to show higher accuracy. In our experiments, five variables such as X7 (total debt), X9 (sales per employee), X13 (years after founded), X15 (accumulated earning to total asset), and X39 (the index related to the cash flows from operating activity) were found to be the most important factors in predicting the corporate credit ratings. However, the values of the finally selected kernel parameters were found to be almost same among the data subsets. To examine whether the predictive performance of GAMSVM was significantly greater than those of other models, we used the McNemar test. As a result, we found that GAMSVM was better than MDA, MLOGIT, CBR, and ANN at the 1% significance level, and better than OAO and DAGSVM at the 5% significance level.