Predicting corporate bankruptcy using artificial neural networks

An appropriate use of neural computing techniques is to apply them to corporate bankruptcy prediction, where conventional solutions can be hard to obtain. Having said that, choosing an appropriate Artificial Neural Network topology (ANN) for predicting corporate bankruptcy would remain a daunting prospect. The context of the problem is that there are no fixed rules in determining the ANN structure or its parameter values, a large number of ANN topologies may have to be constructed with different structures and parameters before determining an acceptable model. The trial‐and‐error process can be tedious, and the experience of the ANN user in constructing the topologies is invaluable in the search for a good model. Yet, a permanent solution does not exist. This paper identifies a non trivial novel approach for implementing artificial neural networks for the prediction of corporate bankruptcy by applying inter‐connected neural networks. The proposed approach is to produce a neural network architecture that captures the underlying characteristics of the problem domain. The research primarily employed financial data sets from the London Stock Exchange and Jordans financial database of major public and private British companies. Early results indicate that an ANN appears to outperform the traditional approach in forecasting corporate bankruptcy.