Credit rating analysis with support vector machines and neural networks: a market comparative study

• Published in: Decision Support Systems 2004-09, Vol.37 (4), p.543-558
• Main Authors: Huang, Zan, Chen, Hsinchun, Hsu, Chia-Jung, Chen, Wun-Hwa, Wu, Soushan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Artificial intelligence; Backpropagation neural networks; Bond rating prediction; Bonds; Credit rating analysis; Credit ratings; Cross-market analysis; Data mining; Input variable contribution analysis; Neural networks; Studies; Support vector machines
• ISSN: 0167-9236; 1873-5797
• DOI: 10.1016/S0167-9236(03)00086-1

Corporate credit rating analysis has attracted lots of research interests in the literature. Recent studies have shown that Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods achieved better performance than traditional statistical methods. This article introduces a relatively new machine learning technique, support vector machines (SVM), to the problem in attempt to provide a model with better explanatory power. We used backpropagation neural network (BNN) as a benchmark and obtained prediction accuracy around 80% for both BNN and SVM methods for the United States and Taiwan markets. However, only slight improvement of SVM was observed. Another direction of the research is to improve the interpretability of the AI-based models. We applied recent research results in neural network model interpretation and obtained relative importance of the input financial variables from the neural network models. Based on these results, we conducted a market comparative analysis on the differences of determining factors in the United States and Taiwan markets.