We are interested in forecasting bankruptcies in a probabilistic way. Specifically, we compare the classification performance of several statistical and machine-learning techniques, namely discriminant analysis (Altman's Z-score), logistic regression, least-squares support vector machines and...

In many economic applications it is desirable to make future predictions about the financial status of a company. The focus of predictions is mainly if a company will default or not. A support vector machine (SVM) is one learning method which uses historical data to establish a classification...