Modelling bankruptcy prediction models in Slovak companies

Department of Economics, Faculty of Operation and Economics of Transport and Communications, University of Zilina, Univerzitna 1, 010 26 Zilina, Slovakia

^* Corresponding author: maria.kovacova@fpedas.uniza.sk

Abstract

An intensive research from academics and practitioners has been provided regarding models for bankruptcy prediction and credit risk management. In spite of numerous researches focusing on forecasting bankruptcy using traditional statistics techniques (e.g. discriminant analysis and logistic regression) and early artificial intelligence models (e.g. artificial neural networks), there is a trend for transition to machine learning models (support vector machines, bagging, boosting, and random forest) to predict bankruptcy one year prior to the event. Comparing the performance of this with unconventional approach with results obtained by discriminant analysis, logistic regression, and neural networks application, it has been found that bagging, boosting, and random forest models outperform the others techniques, and that all prediction accuracy in the testing sample improves when the additional variables are included. On the other side the prediction accuracy of old and well known bankruptcy prediction models is quiet high. Therefore, we aim to analyse these in some way old models on the dataset of Slovak companies to validate their prediction ability in specific conditions. Furthermore, these models will be modelled according to new trends by calculating the influence of elimination of selected variables on the overall prediction ability of these models.