Bankruptcy prediction using Extreme Learning Machine and financial expertise

Bankruptcy prediction has been widely studied as a binary classification problem using financial ratios methodologies. In this paper, Leave-One-Out-Incremental Extreme Learning Machine (LOO-IELM) is explored for this task. LOO-IELM operates in an incremental way to avoid inefficient and unnecessary calculations and stops automatically with the neurons of which the number is unknown. Moreover, Combo method and further Ensemble model are investigated based on different LOO-IELM models and the specific financial indicators. These indicators are chosen using different strategies according to the financial expertise. The entire process has shown its good performance with a very fast speed, and also helps to interpret the model and the special ratios. (C) 2013 Published by Elsevier B.V.