• 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.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.27-65
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• 2020

Many companies on information and communication technology make public their own developed AI technology, for example, Google's TensorFlow, Facebook's PyTorch, Microsoft's CNTK. By releasing deep learning open source software to the public, the relationship with the developer community and the artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem can be strengthened, and users can perform experiment, implementation and improvement of it. Accordingly, the field of machine learning is growing rapidly, and developers are using and reproducing various learning algorithms in each field. Although various analysis of open source software has been made, there is a lack of studies to help develop or use deep learning open source software in the industry. This study thus attempts to derive a strategy for adopting the framework through case studies of a deep learning open source framework. Based on the technology-organization-environment (TOE) framework and literature review related to the adoption of open source software, we employed the case study framework that includes technological factors as perceived relative advantage, perceived compatibility, perceived complexity, and perceived trialability, organizational factors as management support and knowledge & expertise, and environmental factors as availability of technology skills and services, and platform long term viability. We conducted a case study analysis of three companies' adoption cases (two cases of success and one case of failure) and revealed that seven out of eight TOE factors and several factors regarding company, team and resource are significant for the adoption of deep learning open source framework. By organizing the case study analysis results, we provided five important success factors for adopting deep learning framework: the knowledge and expertise of developers in the team, hardware (GPU) environment, data enterprise cooperation system, deep learning framework platform, deep learning framework work tool service. In order for an organization to successfully adopt a deep learning open source framework, at the stage of using the framework, first, the hardware (GPU) environment for AI R&D group must support the knowledge and expertise of the developers in the team. Second, it is necessary to support the use of deep learning frameworks by research developers through collecting and managing data inside and outside the company with a data enterprise cooperation system. Third, deep learning research expertise must be supplemented through cooperation with researchers from academic institutions such as universities and research institutes. Satisfying three procedures in the stage of using the deep learning framework, companies will increase the number of deep learning research developers, the ability to use the deep learning framework, and the support of GPU resource. In the proliferation stage of the deep learning framework, fourth, a company makes the deep learning framework platform that improves the research efficiency and effectiveness of the developers, for example, the optimization of the hardware (GPU) environment automatically. Fifth, the deep learning framework tool service team complements the developers' expertise through sharing the information of the external deep learning open source framework community to the in-house community and activating developer retraining and seminars. To implement the identified five success factors, a step-by-step enterprise procedure for adoption of the deep learning framework was proposed: defining the project problem, confirming whether the deep learning methodology is the right method, confirming whether the deep learning framework is the right tool, using the deep learning framework by the enterprise, spreading the framework of the enterprise. The first three steps (i.e. defining the project problem, confirming whether the deep learning methodology is the right method, and confirming whether the deep learning framework is the right tool) are pre-considerations to adopt a deep learning open source framework. After the three pre-considerations steps are clear, next two steps (i.e. using the deep learning framework by the enterprise and spreading the framework of the enterprise) can be processed. In the fourth step, the knowledge and expertise of developers in the team are important in addition to hardware (GPU) environment and data enterprise cooperation system. In final step, five important factors are realized for a successful adoption of the deep learning open source framework. This study provides strategic implications for companies adopting or using deep learning framework according to the needs of each industry and business.