• Information Systems Review
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.161-177
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• 2014

Corporate credit rating assessment consists of complicated processes in which various factors describing a company are taken into consideration. Such assessment is known to be very expensive since domain experts should be employed to assess the ratings. As a result, the data-driven corporate credit rating prediction using statistical and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques has received considerable attention from researchers and practitioners. In particular, statistical methods such as multiple discriminant analysis (MDA) and multinomial logistic regression analysis (MLOGIT), and AI methods including case-based reasoning (CBR), artificial neural network (ANN), and multiclass support vector machine (MSVM) have been applied to corporate credit rating.2) Among them, MSVM has recently become popular because of its robustness and high prediction accuracy. In this study, we propose a novel optimized MSVM model, and appy it to corporate credit rating prediction in order to enhance the accuracy. Our model, named 'GAMSVM (Genetic Algorithm-optimized Multiclass Support Vector Machine),' is designed to simultaneously optimize the kernel parameters and the feature subset selection. Prior studies like Lorena and de Carvalho (2008), and Chatterjee (2013) show that proper kernel parameters may improve the performance of MSVMs. Also, the results from the studies such as Shieh and Yang (2008) and Chatterjee (2013) imply that appropriate feature selection may lead to higher prediction accuracy. Based on these prior studies, we propose to apply GAMSVM to corporate credit rating prediction. As a tool for optimizing the kernel parameters and the feature subset selection, we suggest genetic algorithm (GA). GA is known as an efficient and effective search method that attempts to simulate the biological evolution phenomenon. By applying genetic operations such as selection, crossover, and mutation, it is designed to gradually improve the search results. Especially, mutation operator prevents GA from falling into the local optima, thus we can find the globally optimal or near-optimal solution using it. GA has popularly been applied to search optimal parameters or feature subset selections of AI techniques including MSVM. With these reasons, we also adopt GA as an optimization tool. To empirically validate the usefulness of GAMSVM, we applied it to a real-world case of credit rating in Korea. Our application is in bond rating, which is the most frequently studied area of credit rating for specific debt issues or other financial obligations. The experimental dataset was collected from a large credit rating company in South Korea. It contained 39 financial ratios of 1,295 companies in the manufacturing industry, and their credit ratings. Using various statistical methods including the one-way ANOVA and the stepwise MDA, we selected 14 financial ratios as the candidate independent variables. The dependent variable, i.e. credit rating, was labeled as four classes: 1(A1); 2(A2); 3(A3); 4(B and C). 80 percent of total data for each class was used for training, and remaining 20 percent was used for validation. And, to overcome small sample size, we applied five-fold cross validation to our dataset. In order to examine the competitiveness of the proposed model, we also experimented several comparative models including MDA, MLOGIT, CBR, ANN and MSVM. In case of MSVM, we adopted One-Against-One (OAO) and DAGSVM (Directed Acyclic Graph SVM) approaches because they are known to be the most accurate approaches among various MSVM approaches. GAMSVM was implemented using LIBSVM-an open-source software, and Evolver 5.5-a commercial software enables GA. Other comparative models were experimented using various statistical and AI packages such as SPSS for Windows, Neuroshell, and Microsoft Excel VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). Experimental results showed that the proposed model-GAMSVM-outperformed all the competitive models. In addition, the model was found to use less independent variables, but to show higher accuracy. In our experiments, five variables such as X7 (total debt), X9 (sales per employee), X13 (years after founded), X15 (accumulated earning to total asset), and X39 (the index related to the cash flows from operating activity) were found to be the most important factors in predicting the corporate credit ratings. However, the values of the finally selected kernel parameters were found to be almost same among the data subsets. To examine whether the predictive performance of GAMSVM was significantly greater than those of other models, we used the McNemar test. As a result, we found that GAMSVM was better than MDA, MLOGIT, CBR, and ANN at the 1% significance level, and better than OAO and DAGSVM at the 5% significance level.

• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.241-265
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• 2020

Purpose Various machine learning techniques are used to implement for predicting corporate credit. However, previous research doesn't utilize time series input features and has a limited prediction timing. Furthermore, in the case of corporate bond credit rating forecast, corporate sample is limited because only large companies are selected for corporate bond credit rating. To address limitations of prior research, this study attempts to implement a predictive model with more sample companies, which can adjust the forecasting point at the present time by using the credit score information and corporate information in time series. Design/methodology/approach To implement this forecasting model, this study uses the sample of 2,191 companies with KIS credit scores for 18 years from 2000 to 2017. For improving the performance of the predictive model, various financial and non-financial features are applied as input variables in a time series through a sliding window technique. In addition, this research also tests various machine learning techniques that were traditionally used to increase the validity of analysis results, and the deep learning technique that is being actively researched of late. Findings RNN-based stateful LSTM model shows good performance in credit rating prediction. By extending the forecasting time point, we find how the performance of the predictive model changes over time and evaluate the feature groups in the short and long terms. In comparison with other studies, the results of 5 classification prediction through label reclassification show good performance relatively. In addition, about 90% accuracy is found in the bad credit forecasts.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.83-89
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• 2022

As a representative technique of recommender systems, collaborative filtering has been successfully in service through many commercial and academic systems. This technique recommends items highly rated by similar neighbor users, based on similarity of ratings on common items rated by two users. Recently research on time-aware recommender systems has been conducted, which attempts to improve system performance by reflecting user rating time of items. However, the decay rate uniform to past ratings has a risk of lowering the rating prediction performance of the system. This study proposes a rating time-aware similarity measure between users, which is a novel approach different from previous ones. The proposed approach considers changes of similarity value over time, not item rating time. In order to evaluate performance of the proposed method, experiments using various parameter values and types of time change functions are conducted, resulting in improving prediction accuracy of existing traditional similarity measures significantly.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers A
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• v.55 no.7
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• pp.273-280
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• 2006

This paper suggests the method that forecasts Dynamic Line Rating (DLR). Thermal Overload Risk Probability (TORP) of the next time is forecasted based on the present weather conditions and DLR value by Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS). To model weather elements of transmission line for MCS process, this paper will propose the use of statistical weather models that time series is applied. Also, through the case study, it is confirmed that the forecasted TORP can be utilized as a criterion that decides DLR of next time. In short, proposed method may be used usefully to keep security and reliability of transmission line by forecasting transmission capacity of the next time.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.13 no.9
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• pp.4684-4705
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• 2019

Collaborative filtering recommender systems are vulnerable to shilling attacks in which malicious users may inject biased profiles to promote or demote a particular item being recommended. To tackle this problem, many robust collaborative recommendation methods have been presented. Unfortunately, the robustness of most methods is improved at the expense of prediction accuracy. In this paper, we construct a robust Bayesian probabilistic matrix factorization model for collaborative filtering recommender systems by incorporating the detection of user anomaly rating behaviors. We first detect the anomaly rating behaviors of users by the modified K-means algorithm and target item identification method to generate an indicator matrix of attack users. Then we incorporate the indicator matrix of attack users to construct a robust Bayesian probabilistic matrix factorization model and based on which a robust collaborative recommendation algorithm is devised. The experimental results on the MovieLens and Netflix datasets show that our model can significantly improve the robustness and recommendation accuracy compared with three baseline methods.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.171-189
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• 2022

Online reviews play an essential role in the consumer's purchasing decision-making process, and thus, providing helpful and reliable reviews is essential to consumers. Previous online review helpfulness prediction studies mainly predicted review helpfulness based on the consistency of text and rating information of online reviews. However, there is a limitation in that representation capacity or review text and rating interaction. We propose a CNN-RHP model that effectively learns the interaction between review text and rating information to improve the limitations of previous studies. Multi-channel CNNs were applied to extract the semantic representation of the review text. We also converted rating into independent high-dimensional embedding vectors representing the same dimension as the text vector. The consistency between the review text and the rating information is learned based on element-wise operations between the review text and the star rating vector. To evaluate the performance of the proposed CNN-RHP model in this study, we used online reviews collected from Amazom.com. Experimental results show that the CNN-RHP model indicates excellent performance compared to several benchmark models. The results of this study can provide practical implications when providing services related to review helpfulness on online e-commerce platforms.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.139-155
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• 2009

For the last few decades, many studies have tried to explore and unveil venture companies' success factors and unique features in order to identify the sources of such companies' competitive advantages over their rivals. Such venture companies have shown tendency to give high returns for investors generally making the best use of information technology. For this reason, many venture companies are keen on attracting avid investors' attention. Investors generally make their investment decisions by carefully examining the evaluation criteria of the alternatives. To them, credit rating information provided by international rating agencies, such as Standard and Poor's, Moody's and Fitch is crucial source as to such pivotal concerns as companies stability, growth, and risk status. But these types of information are generated only for the companies issuing corporate bonds, not venture companies. Therefore, this study proposes a method for evaluating venture businesses by presenting our recent empirical results using financial data of Korean venture companies listed on KOSDAQ in Korea exchange. In addition, this paper used multi-class SVM for the prediction of DEA-based efficiency rating for venture businesses, which was derived from our proposed method. Our approach sheds light on ways to locate efficient companies generating high level of profits. Above all, in determining effective ways to evaluate a venture firm's efficiency, it is important to understand the major contributing factors of such efficiency. Therefore, this paper is constructed on the basis of following two ideas to classify which companies are more efficient venture companies: i) making DEA based multi-class rating for sample companies and ii) developing multi-class SVM-based efficiency prediction model for classifying all companies. First, the Data Envelopment Analysis(DEA) is a non-parametric multiple input-output efficiency technique that measures the relative efficiency of decision making units(DMUs) using a linear programming based model. It is non-parametric because it requires no assumption on the shape or parameters of the underlying production function. DEA has been already widely applied for evaluating the relative efficiency of DMUs. Recently, a number of DEA based studies have evaluated the efficiency of various types of companies, such as internet companies and venture companies. It has been also applied to corporate credit ratings. In this study we utilized DEA for sorting venture companies by efficiency based ratings. The Support Vector Machine(SVM), on the other hand, is a popular technique for solving data classification problems. In this paper, we employed SVM to classify the efficiency ratings in IT venture companies according to the results of DEA. The SVM method was first developed by Vapnik (1995). As one of many machine learning techniques, SVM is based on a statistical theory. Thus far, the method has shown good performances especially in generalizing capacity in classification tasks, resulting in numerous applications in many areas of business, SVM is basically the algorithm that finds the maximum margin hyperplane, which is the maximum separation between classes. According to this method, support vectors are the closest to the maximum margin hyperplane. If it is impossible to classify, we can use the kernel function. In the case of nonlinear class boundaries, we can transform the inputs into a high-dimensional feature space, This is the original input space and is mapped into a high-dimensional dot-product space. Many studies applied SVM to the prediction of bankruptcy, the forecast a financial time series, and the problem of estimating credit rating, In this study we employed SVM for developing data mining-based efficiency prediction model. We used the Gaussian radial function as a kernel function of SVM. In multi-class SVM, we adopted one-against-one approach between binary classification method and two all-together methods, proposed by Weston and Watkins(1999) and Crammer and Singer(2000), respectively. In this research, we used corporate information of 154 companies listed on KOSDAQ market in Korea exchange. We obtained companies' financial information of 2005 from the KIS(Korea Information Service, Inc.). Using this data, we made multi-class rating with DEA efficiency and built multi-class prediction model based data mining. Among three manners of multi-classification, the hit ratio of the Weston and Watkins method is the best in the test data set. In multi classification problems as efficiency ratings of venture business, it is very useful for investors to know the class with errors, one class difference, when it is difficult to find out the accurate class in the actual market. So we presented accuracy results within 1-class errors, and the Weston and Watkins method showed 85.7% accuracy in our test samples. We conclude that the DEA based multi-class approach in venture business generates more information than the binary classification problem, notwithstanding its efficiency level. We believe this model can help investors in decision making as it provides a reliably tool to evaluate venture companies in the financial domain. For the future research, we perceive the need to enhance such areas as the variable selection process, the parameter selection of kernel function, the generalization, and the sample size of multi-class.

• The Journal of Korean Association of Computer Education
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.63-70
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• 2011

Recommender systems, which predict and recommend items that may possibly draw users' interests, have been applied in various fields as e-commerce systems are widespread. Collaborative filtering, one of the major methodologies of recommender systems, recommends either items similar to those preferred by the user, or items preferred by the other similar user. Therefore, two problems determine its performance; one is correct estimation of similarity and the other is predicting the real rating of the recommended item. This study addresses the latter problem. Previous studies predict the real rating based on the mean of the ratings, but this study proposes a prediction based on the range of the ratings and investigates its performance through experiments. As a result, it is demonstrated that the proposed method improves the mean absolute error significantly, compared to the previous method.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.29-45
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• 2012

Bond rating is regarded as an important event for measuring financial risk of companies and for determining the investment returns of investors. As a result, it has been a popular research topic for researchers to predict companies' credit ratings by applying statistical and machine learning techniques. The statistical techniques, including multiple regression, multiple discriminant analysis (MDA), logistic models (LOGIT), and probit analysis, have been traditionally used in bond rating. However, one major drawback is that it should be based on strict assumptions. Such strict assumptions include linearity, normality, independence among predictor variables and pre-existing functional forms relating the criterion variablesand the predictor variables. Those strict assumptions of traditional statistics have limited their application to the real world. Machine learning techniques also used in bond rating prediction models include decision trees (DT), neural networks (NN), and Support Vector Machine (SVM). Especially, SVM is recognized as a new and promising classification and regression analysis method. SVM learns a separating hyperplane that can maximize the margin between two categories. SVM is simple enough to be analyzed mathematical, and leads to high performance in practical applications. SVM implements the structuralrisk minimization principle and searches to minimize an upper bound of the generalization error. In addition, the solution of SVM may be a global optimum and thus, overfitting is unlikely to occur with SVM. In addition, SVM does not require too many data sample for training since it builds prediction models by only using some representative sample near the boundaries called support vectors. A number of experimental researches have indicated that SVM has been successfully applied in a variety of pattern recognition fields. However, there are three major drawbacks that can be potential causes for degrading SVM's performance. First, SVM is originally proposed for solving binary-class classification problems. Methods for combining SVMs for multi-class classification such as One-Against-One, One-Against-All have been proposed, but they do not improve the performance in multi-class classification problem as much as SVM for binary-class classification. Second, approximation algorithms (e.g. decomposition methods, sequential minimal optimization algorithm) could be used for effective multi-class computation to reduce computation time, but it could deteriorate classification performance. Third, the difficulty in multi-class prediction problems is in data imbalance problem that can occur when the number of instances in one class greatly outnumbers the number of instances in the other class. Such data sets often cause a default classifier to be built due to skewed boundary and thus the reduction in the classification accuracy of such a classifier. SVM ensemble learning is one of machine learning methods to cope with the above drawbacks. Ensemble learning is a method for improving the performance of classification and prediction algorithms. AdaBoost is one of the widely used ensemble learning techniques. It constructs a composite classifier by sequentially training classifiers while increasing weight on the misclassified observations through iterations. The observations that are incorrectly predicted by previous classifiers are chosen more often than examples that are correctly predicted. Thus Boosting attempts to produce new classifiers that are better able to predict examples for which the current ensemble's performance is poor. In this way, it can reinforce the training of the misclassified observations of the minority class. This paper proposes a multiclass Geometric Mean-based Boosting (MGM-Boost) to resolve multiclass prediction problem. Since MGM-Boost introduces the notion of geometric mean into AdaBoost, it can perform learning process considering the geometric mean-based accuracy and errors of multiclass. This study applies MGM-Boost to the real-world bond rating case for Korean companies to examine the feasibility of MGM-Boost. 10-fold cross validations for threetimes with different random seeds are performed in order to ensure that the comparison among three different classifiers does not happen by chance. For each of 10-fold cross validation, the entire data set is first partitioned into tenequal-sized sets, and then each set is in turn used as the test set while the classifier trains on the other nine sets. That is, cross-validated folds have been tested independently of each algorithm. Through these steps, we have obtained the results for classifiers on each of the 30 experiments. In the comparison of arithmetic mean-based prediction accuracy between individual classifiers, MGM-Boost (52.95%) shows higher prediction accuracy than both AdaBoost (51.69%) and SVM (49.47%). MGM-Boost (28.12%) also shows the higher prediction accuracy than AdaBoost (24.65%) and SVM (15.42%)in terms of geometric mean-based prediction accuracy. T-test is used to examine whether the performance of each classifiers for 30 folds is significantly different. The results indicate that performance of MGM-Boost is significantly different from AdaBoost and SVM classifiers at 1% level. These results mean that MGM-Boost can provide robust and stable solutions to multi-classproblems such as bond rating.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.51-61
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• 1999