Cost-Sensitive Metaheuristic Optimization-Based Neural Network with Ensemble Learning for Financial Distress Prediction

Financial distress prediction is crucial in the financial domain because of its implications for banks, businesses, and corporations. Serious financial losses may occur because of poor financial distress prediction. As a result, significant efforts have been made to develop prediction models that can assist decision-makers to anticipate events before they occur and avoid bankruptcy, thereby helping to improve the quality of such tasks. Because of the usual highly imbalanced distribution of data, financial distress prediction is a challenging task. Hence, a wide range of methods and algorithms have been developed over recent decades to address the classification of imbalanced datasets. Metaheuristic optimization-based artificial neural networks have shown exciting results in a variety of applications, as well as classification problems. However, less consideration has been paid to using a cost sensitivity fitness function in metaheuristic optimization-based artificial neural networks to solve the financial distress prediction problem. In this work, we propose ENS_PSONNcost and ENS_CSONNcost: metaheuristic optimization-based artificial neural networks that utilize a particle swarm optimizer and a competitive swarm optimizer and five cost sensitivity fitness functions as the base learners in a majority voting ensemble learning paradigm. Three extremely imbalanced datasets from Spanish, Taiwanese, and Polish companies were considered to avoid dataset bias. The results showed significant improvements in the g-mean (the geometric mean of sensitivity and specificity) metric and the F1 score (the harmonic mean of precision and sensitivity) while maintaining adequately high accuracy.