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Machine Learning and Financial Ratios as an Alternative to Altman’s Z-Score Bankruptcy Model in Spanish Companies

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Decision Economics: Minds, Machines, and their Society (DECON 2020)

Abstract

It is important to be able to predict the performance of a company in terms of bankruptcy, however, to date, there is no robust automated model capable of predicting corporate bankruptcy regardless of the sector to which a company belongs. This study has estimated the expected probability of bankruptcy of companies in 3 different sectors (the manufacturing sector for which Z-score had been initially developed as well as wholesale and finance; two of the most important sectors in terms of contribution to the Spain’s GDP). The proposed model has a success rate of over 90% in predicting bankruptcy and analyses fewer company’s attributes than the Altman Z-score model.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    SABI database (https://sabi.bvdinfo.com/): Sabi contains detailed information about companies in Spain and Portugal. It is public and can be used to carry out research on companies.

  2. 2.

    CNAE codes: https://www.cnae.com.es/.

  3. 3.

    https://numpy.org/.

  4. 4.

    https://pandas.pydata.org/.

  5. 5.

    https://scikit-learn.org/stable/.

  6. 6.

    https://seaborn.pydata.org/.

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Acknowledgements

This research has been supported by the project “INTELFIN: Artificial Intelligence for investment and value creation in SMEs through competitive analysis and business environment”, Reference: RTC-2017-6536-7, funded by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (Challenges-Collaboration 2017), the State Agency for Research (AEI) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).

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Correspondence to María E. Pérez-Pons .

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Pérez-Pons, M.E., Parra, J., Hernández, G., González, J., Corchado, J.M. (2021). Machine Learning and Financial Ratios as an Alternative to Altman’s Z-Score Bankruptcy Model in Spanish Companies. In: Bucciarelli, E., Chen, SH., Corchado, J.M., Parra D., J. (eds) Decision Economics: Minds, Machines, and their Society. DECON 2020. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 990. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75583-6_13

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