Two dimensional reduction technique of Support Vector Machines for Bankruptcy Prediction

Prediction of corporate bankruptcies has long been an important topic and has been studied extensively in the finance and management literature because it is an essential basis for the risk management of financial institutions. Recently, support vector machines (SVMs) are becoming popular as a tool for bankruptcy prediction because they use a risk function consisting of the empirical error and a regularized term which is derived from the structural risk minimization principle. In addition, they don't require huge training samples and have little possibility of overfitting. However. in order to Use SVM, a user should determine several factors such as the parameters ofa kernel function, appropriate feature subset, and proper instance subset by heuristics, which hinders accurate prediction results when using SVM In this study, we propose a novel hybrid SVM classifier with simultaneous optimization of feature subsets, instance subsets, and kernel parameters. This study introduces genetic algorithms (GAs) to optimize the feature selection, instance selection, and kernel parameters simultaneously. Our study applies the proposed model to the real-world case for bankruptcy prediction. Experimental results show that the prediction accuracy of conventional SVM may be improved significantly by using our model.