Comparing the Performance of Deep Learning Methods to Predict Companies’ Financial Failure

One of the most crucial problems in the field of business is financial forecasting. Many companies are interested in forecasting their incoming financial status in order to adapt to the current financial and business environment to avoid bankruptcy. In this work, due to the effectiveness of Deep Learning methods with respect to classification tasks, we compare the performance of three well-known Deep Learning methods (Long-Short Term Memory, Deep Belief Network and Multilayer Perceptron model of 6 layers) with three bagging ensemble classifiers (Random Forest, Support Vector Machine and K-Nearest Neighbor) and two boosting ensemble classifiers (Adaptive Boosting and Extreme Gradient Boosting) in companies' financial failure prediction. Because of the inherent nature of the problem addressed, three extremely imbalanced datasets of Spanish, Taiwanese and Polish companies' data have been considered in this study. Thus, five oversampling balancing techniques, two hybrid balancing techniques (oversampling-undersampling) and one clustering-based balancing technique have been applied to avoid data inconsistency problem. Considering the real financial data complexity level and type, the results show that the Multilayer Perceptron model of 6 layers, in conjunction with SMOTE-ENN balancing method, yielded the best performance according to the accuracy, recall and type II error metrics. In addition, Long-Short Term Memory and ensemble methods obtained also very good results, outperforming several classifiers used in previous studies with the same datasets.