• Information Systems Review
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.105-123
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• 2022

Thanks to the remarkable success of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) techniques, a new possibility for its application on the real-world problem has begun. One of the prominent applications is the bankruptcy prediction model as it is often used as a basic knowledge base for credit scoring models in the financial industry. As a result, there has been extensive research on how to improve the prediction accuracy of the model. However, despite its impressive performance, it is difficult to implement machine learning (ML)-based models due to its intrinsic trait of obscurity, especially when the field requires or values an explanation about the result obtained by the model. The financial domain is one of the areas where explanation matters to stakeholders such as domain experts and customers. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to incorporate financial domain knowledge into local rule generation to provide explanations for the bankruptcy prediction model at instance level. The result shows the proposed method successfully selects and classifies the extracted rules based on the feasibility and information they convey to the users.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.307-332
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• 2022

One of the most intensively conducted research areas in business application study is a bankruptcy prediction model, a representative classification problem related to loan lending, investment decision making, and profitability to financial institutions. Many research demonstrated outstanding performance for bankruptcy prediction models using artificial intelligence techniques. However, since most machine learning algorithms are "black-box," AI has been identified as a prominent research topic for providing users with an explanation. Although there are many different approaches for explanations, this study focuses on explaining a bankruptcy prediction model using a counterfactual example. Users can obtain desired output from the model by using a counterfactual-based explanation, which provides an alternative case. This study introduces a counterfactual generation technique based on a genetic algorithm (GA) that leverages both domain knowledge (i.e., causal feasibility) and feature importance from a black-box model along with other critical counterfactual variables, including proximity, distribution, and sparsity. The proposed method was evaluated quantitatively and qualitatively to measure the quality and the validity.