Skip to main content
Log in

Credit rating modelling by kernel-based approaches with supervised and semi-supervised learning

  • EANN 2009
  • Published:
Neural Computing and Applications Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

This paper presents the modelling possibilities of kernel-based approaches to a complex real-world problem, i.e. corporate and municipal credit rating classification. Based on a model design that includes data pre-processing, the labelling of individual parameter vectors using expert knowledge, the design of various support vector machines with supervised learning as well as kernel-based approaches with semi-supervised learning, this modelling is undertaken in order to classify objects into rating classes. The results show that the rating classes assigned to bond issuers can be classified with high classification accuracy using a limited subset of input variables. This holds true for kernel-based approaches with both supervised and semi-supervised learning.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Abe S (2005) Support vector machines for pattern classification. Springer-Verlag, London

    Google Scholar 

  2. Ahn H, Kim KJ (2005) Combining pairwise SVM classifiers for bond rating. In, Proc of KMIS int conf, pp 586–590

    Google Scholar 

  3. Altman E, Katz S (1976) Statistical bond rating classification using financial and accounting data. In: Sorter G, Schiff M (eds) Topical research in accounting. NYU Press, New York

    Google Scholar 

  4. Ammar S, Duncombe W, Hou Y (2001) Using fuzzy rule-based systems to evaluate overall financial performance of governments: An enhancement to the bond rating process. Public Budg Finance 21:91–110

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Bennett KP, Demiriz A (1999) Semi-supervised support vector machines. In: Proc of int conf on advances in neural information processing systems. MIT Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  6. Brabazon A, O’Neill M (2006) Credit classification using grammatical evolution. Inform 30:325–335

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  7. Brennan D, Brabazon A (2004) Corporate bond rating using neural networks. In: Proc of the conf on artificial intelligence, Las Vegas, pp 161–167

  8. Carleton WT, Lerner EM (1969) Statistical scoring of municipal bonds. J Money Credit Bank 11:750–764

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Chapelle O, Schölkopf B, Zien A (2006) Semi-supervised learning. MIT Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  10. Chapelle O, Zien A (2005) Semi-supervised classification by low density separation. In: Proc of the 10th int workshop on artificial intelligence and statistics, Barbados

  11. Chaveesuk R, Srivaree-Ratana C (1999) Alternative neural network approaches to corporate bond rating. J Eng Valuat Cost Anal 2:117–131

    Google Scholar 

  12. Copeland RM, Ingram RW (1982) The association between municipal accounting information and bond rating changes. J Account Res 20:275–289

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Cristianini N, Shawe-Taylor J (2000) An introduction to support vector machines and other kernel-based learning methods. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  14. Delahunty A, OCallaghan D (2004) Artificial immune systems for the prediction of corporate failure and classification of corporate bond ratings. University College Dublin, Dublin

    Google Scholar 

  15. Dutta S, Shekhar S (1988) Bond rating: a non-conservative application of neural networks. In: Proc of the IEEE international conf on neural networks, pp 443–450

    Google Scholar 

  16. Farnham PG, Cluff GS (1982) Municipal bond ratings: New directions, new results. Publ Finance Quantum 26:427–455

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Farnham PG, Cluff GS (1984) Standard and Poor’s vs. Moody’s: Which city characteristics influence municipal bond ratings? Quantum Rev Econ Bus 24:72–94

    Google Scholar 

  18. Garavaglia S (1991) An application of a counter-propagation neural networks: Simulating the Standard & Poor’s corporate bond rating system. In: Proc. of the 1st int conf on artificial intelligence on Wall Street, pp 278–287

  19. Hajek P, Olej V (2008) Municipal creditworthiness modelling by Kohonen’s self-organizing feature maps and fuzzy logic neural networks. In: Kurkova V, Neruda R, Koutnik J (eds) Lecture notes in artificial intelligence. Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, pp 533–542

    Google Scholar 

  20. Hajek P, Olej V (2007) Municipal creditworthiness modelling by clustering methods. In: Margaritis I (ed) Proc of the 10th int conf on engineering applications of neural networks, pp 168–177

  21. Haykin S (1999) Neural networks: a comprehensive foundation. Prentice-Hall, New Jersey

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  22. Horrigan JL (1966) The determination of long term credit standing with financial ratios, empirical research in accounting: selected studies. J Account Res 4

  23. Horton JJ (1970) Statistical classification of municipal bonds. J Bank Res 3:29–40

    Google Scholar 

  24. Huang Z, Chen H (2004) Credit rating analysis with support vector machines and neural networks: A market comparative study. Decis Supp Syst 37:543–558

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. ChL Huang, MCh Chen, ChJ Wang (2007) Credit scoring with a data mining approach based on support vector machines. Exp Syst Appl 33:847–856

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Huang TM, Kecman V (2004) Semi-supervised learning from unbalanced labeled data—an improvement. Lecture Notes Comput Sci 3215:765–771

    Google Scholar 

  27. Huang TM, Kecman V (2005) Semi-supervised learning from unbalanced labeled data—an improvement. Special Issue of KES Int J, ISO press, Netherlands

    Google Scholar 

  28. Huang TM, Kecman V (2005) Performance comparison of semi-supervised learning algorithms. The 22nd conf on machine learning. ICML 2005:45–49

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  29. Huang TM, Kecman V, Kopriva I (2006) Kernel based algorithms for mining huge data sets. Supervised. semi-supervised, and unsupervised learning. Studies in computational intelligence, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  30. RCh Hwang, Cheng KF (2008) On multiple-class prediction of issuer credit ratings. Appl Stoch Models Bus Ind 5:535–550

    Google Scholar 

  31. Jackson JD, Boyd JW (1988) A statistical approach to modelling the behavior of bond raters. J Behav Econ 17:173–193

    Article  Google Scholar 

  32. Kamstra M, Kennedy P, Suan TK (2001) Combining bond rating forecasts using logit. Financ Rev 37:75–96

    Article  Google Scholar 

  33. Kaplan RS, Urwitz G (1979) Statistical models of bond ratings: a methodological inquiry. J Bus 52:231–261

    Article  Google Scholar 

  34. Kim JW (1993) Expert systems for bond rating: A comparative analysis of statistical, rule-based and neural network systems. Exp Syst 10:167–171

    Article  Google Scholar 

  35. Kim KS (2005) Predicting bond ratings using publicly available information. Exp Syst Appl 29:75–81

    Article  Google Scholar 

  36. Kim KS, Han I (2001) The cluster-indexing method for case-based reasoning using self-organizing maps and learning vector quantization for bond rating cases. Exp Syst Appl 21:147–156

    Article  Google Scholar 

  37. Klose A (2004) Extracting fuzzy classification rules from partially labelled data. Soft Comput 8:417–427

    Google Scholar 

  38. Kwon YS, Han IG (1997) Ordinal pairwise partitioning approach to neural networks training in bond rating. Intell Syst Account Fin Manag 6:23–40

    Article  Google Scholar 

  39. Lee YCh (2007) Application of support vector machines to corporate credit rating prediction. Exp Syst Appl 33:67–74

    Article  Google Scholar 

  40. Loviscek LA, Crowley FD (1990) What is in a municipal bond rating? Financ Rev 25:25–53

    Article  Google Scholar 

  41. Loviscek LA, Crowley FD (2003) Municipal bond ratings and municipal debt management. Marcel Dekker, New York

    Google Scholar 

  42. Maher JJ, Sen TK (1997) Predicting bond ratings using neural networks: A comparison with logistic regression. Intell Syst Account Fin Manag 6:59–72

    Article  Google Scholar 

  43. Michel AJ (1977) Municipal bond rating: Discriminant analysis approach. J Finan Quant Anal 12:587–598

    Article  Google Scholar 

  44. Moody J, Utans J (1995) Architecture selection strategies for neural networks application to corporate bond rating. In: Refenes A (ed) Neural networks in the capital markets. Wiley, Chichester, pp 277–300

    Google Scholar 

  45. Morton TG (1975) A comparative analysis of Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s municipal bond ratings. Rev Bus Econ Res 1:74–81

    Google Scholar 

  46. Olej V, Hajek P (2007) Hierarchical structure of fuzzy inference systems design for municipal creditworthiness modelling. WSEAS Trans Syst Cont 2:162–169

    Google Scholar 

  47. Pinches GE, Mingo KA (1973) A multivariate analysis of industrial bond ratings. J Finance 28:1–18

    Article  Google Scholar 

  48. Serve S (2001) Assessment of local financial risk: The determinants of the rating of European local authorities - an empirical study over the period 1995–1998. EFMA Lugano, Lugano

    Google Scholar 

  49. Shin KS, Han I (2001) A case-based approach using inductive indexing for corporate bond rating. Decis Supp Syst 32:41–52

    Article  Google Scholar 

  50. Singleton JC, Surkan AJ (1995) Bond rating with neural networks. In: Refenes A (ed) Neural networks in the capital markets. Wiley, Chichester, pp 301–307

    Google Scholar 

  51. Stock D, Robertson T (1981) Improved techniques for predicting municipal bond ratings. J Bank Res 12:153–160

    Google Scholar 

  52. Vapnik VN (1995) The nature of statistical learning theory. Springer-Verlag, New York

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  53. West RR (1970) An alternative approach to predicting corporate bond ratings. J Account Res 8:118–125

    Article  Google Scholar 

  54. Zhou D, Bousquet O, Lal TN, Weston J, Schölkopf B (2004) Learning with local and global consistency. In: Thrun S, Saul L, Schölkopf B (eds) Advances in neural information processing systems 16. MIT Press, Cambridge, pp 321–328

    Google Scholar 

  55. Zhou D, Schölkopf B (2004) A regularization framework for learning from graph data. In: Workshop on statistical relational learning at 21st int conf on machine learning, pp 132–137

  56. Zhu X (2005) Semi-supervised learning: literature survey. http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~jerryzhu/pub/ssl_survey. Accessed 6 June 2009

  57. Zhu XJ, Ghahramani Z, Lafferty J (2003) Semisupervised learning using Gaussian fields and harmonic functions. In: Proc of the 20th int conf on machine learning, Washington, DC

Download references

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by a scientific research grant by the Czech Science Foundation, under Grant No: 402/09/P090 with the title Modelling of Municipal Finance by Computational Intelligence Methods and Grant No: 402/08/0849 with the title Model of Sustainable Regional Development Management.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Petr Hájek.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Hájek, P., Olej, V. Credit rating modelling by kernel-based approaches with supervised and semi-supervised learning. Neural Comput & Applic 20, 761–773 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-010-0495-0

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-010-0495-0

Keywords

Navigation