Application of support vector machines to corporate credit rating prediction

Corporate credit rating analysis has drawn a lot of research interests in previous studies, and recent studies have shown that machine learning techniques achieved better performance than traditional statistical ones. This paper applies support vector machines (SVMs) to the corporate credit rating problem in an attempt to suggest a new model with better explanatory power and stability. To serve this purpose, the researcher uses a grid-search technique using 5-fold cross-validation to find out the optimal parameter values of RBF kernel function of SVM. In addition, to evaluate the prediction accuracy of SVM, the researcher compares its performance with those of multiple discriminant analysis (MDA), case-based reasoning (CBR), and three-layer fully connected back-propagation neural networks (BPNs). The experiment results show that SVM outperforms the other methods. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.