Predicting Companies Financial Distress by Using Ant Colony Algorithm

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 MSc. in Business Management, Faculty of Management, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

2 Assistant Prof., Faculty of Management, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

Financial distress prediction of companies is one of the important issues that can contribute to the success and survival of companies; because providing warning and timely signals can make companies aware of financial distress and bankruptcy and, therefore, by a correct management, they can prevent waste of resources and the damage caused by bankruptcy.
Ant Colony Algorithm (ACA) is an intelligent method that was recently used to solve problems including classifications and predictions which had desired results. This study aims to investigate the financial distress prediction of companies using ant colony algorithm. The statistical population includes companies listed in Tehran Stock Exchange and the sample consists of 174 healthy and distressed companies. Predictor variables were selected from previous studies according to the ratios that were proposed as key variables in prediction model.
The results of the study indicate that the ACA approach in predicting financial distress of companies had significantly better performance than multiple discriminant analysis (MDA).

Keywords

Main Subjects


Altman, E. I. (1968). Financial ratios, discriminant analysis and the Prediction of corporate bankruptcy.The Journal of Finance, 23 (4), 589- 609.
Anandarajan, M., Lee, P. & Anandarajan, A. (2004). Bankruptcy Predication Using Neural Networks: A Perspective from Accounting And Finance. Springer-Verlag.
Bellovary, J., Giacomino, D. & Akers, M. (2007). A Review of Bankruptcy Prediction Studies: 1930 to Present. Journal of Financial Education.
Brabazon, A. O’Neill, M. (2006).Biologically Inspired Algorithms for Financial Modelling. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, Germany.
Chen, J. (2012). Developing SFNN models to predict financial distress of construction companies. Expert Systems with Applications, (39), 823–827.
Chiang Y.C., Et Al. (2010). A Hybrid Approach Of Dea, Rough Set And Support Vector Machines For Business Failure Prediction. Expert Systems with Applications, (37), 1535-1541.
Etemadi, H., Anvary Rostami, A. A., Farajzadeh Dehkordi, H. (2008). A genetic programming model for bankruptcy prediction: Empirical evidence from Iran. Expert Systems with Applications.
Goletsis, Y., Exarchos P., Themis, Katsis, Cheristos (2009). Can Ants Predict Bankruptcy? A Comparison of Ant Colony Systems to Other State-of-The-Art Computational Methods. New Mathematics and Natural Computation, 5(3), 571-588.
Wang, S., Wu, L., Zhang, Y., Zhou Z. (2009). Ant colony algorithm used for bankruptcy prediction. Second International Symposium on Information Science and Engineering, IEEE Computer Society.
Tsai, C. (2009). Feature Selection In Bankruptcy Prediction. Knowledge- ased Systems, (22), 120–127.
Xu, X., Wang, Y. (2009). Financial Failure Prediction Using Efficiency As A Predictor. Expert Systems With Applications, (36), 366-373.