A case of corporate failure prediction

Although numerous studies demonstrate that one technique outperforms the others for a given data set, there is often no way to tell a priori which of these techniques will be most effective to solve a specific problem. Alternatively, it has been suggested that a better approach to classification problem might be to integrate several different forecasting techniques by combining their results. The issues of interest are how to integrate different modeling techniques to increase the prediction performance. This paper proposes the post-model integration method, which means integration is performed after individual techniques produce their own outputs, by finding the best combination of the results of each method. To get the optimal or near optimal combination of different prediction techniques. Genetic Algorithms (GAs) are applied, which are particularly suitable for multi-parameter optimization problems with an objective function subject to numerous hard and soft constraints. This study applied three individual classification techniques (Discriminant analysis, Logit and Neural Networks) as base models to the corporate failure prediction context. Results of composite prediction were compared to the individual models. Preliminary results suggests that the use of integrated methods will offer improved performance in business classification problems.