This paper presents a comprehensive review of hybrid and ensemble-based soft computing techniques applied to bankruptcy prediction.
A variety of soft computing techniques are being applied to bankruptcy prediction. Our focus is on techniques, namely how
different techniques are combined, but not on obtained results. Almost all authors demonstrate that the technique they propose
outperforms some other methods chosen for the comparison. However, due to different data sets used by different authors and
bearing in mind the fact that confidence intervals for the prediction accuracies are seldom provided, fair comparison of results
obtained by different authors is hardly possible. Simulations covering a large variety of techniques and data sets are needed
for a fair comparison. We call a technique hybrid if several soft computing approaches are applied in the analysis and only
one predictor is used to make the final prediction. In contrast, outputs of several predictors are combined, to obtain an
ensemble-based prediction.
Keywords Bankruptcy prediction - Ensemble - Committee - SVM - Neural network - Fuzzy sets - Decision trees - Case-based reasoning - Genetic algorithms - Rough sets - Hybrid techniques