A New Hybrid Algorithm for Bankruptcy Prediction Using Switching Particle Swarm Optimization and Support Vector Machines

Bankruptcy prediction has been extensively investigated by data mining techniques since it is a critical issue in the accounting and finance field. In this paper, a new hybrid algorithm combining switching particle swarm optimization (SPSO) and support vector machine (SVM) is proposed to solve the bankruptcy prediction problem. In particular, a recently developed SPSO algorithm is exploited to search the optimal parameter values of radial basis function (RBF) kernel of the SVM. The new algorithm can largely improve the explanatory power and the stability of the SVM. The proposed algorithm is successfully applied in the bankruptcy prediction problem, where experiment data sets are originally from the UCI Machine Learning Repository. The simulation results show the superiority of proposed algorithm over the traditional SVM-based methods combined with genetic algorithm (GA) or the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm alone.