Financial Information Asymmetry: Using Deep Learning Algorithms to Predict Financial Distress

Abstract

Because of the financial information asymmetry, the stakeholders usually do not know a company’s real financial condition until financial distress occurs. Financial distress not only influences a company’s operational sustainability and damages the rights and interests of its stakeholders, it may also harm the national economy and society; hence, it is very important to build high-accuracy financial distress prediction models. The purpose of this study is to build high-accuracy and effective financial distress prediction models by two representative deep learning algorithms: Deep neural networks (DNN) and convolutional neural networks (CNN). In addition, important variables are selected by the chi-squared automatic interaction detector (CHAID). In this study, the data of Taiwan’s listed and OTC sample companies are taken from the Taiwan Economic Journal (TEJ) database during the period from 2000 to 2019, including 86 companies in financial distress and 258 not in financial distress, for a total of 344 companies. According to the empirical results, with the important variables selected by CHAID and modeling by CNN, the CHAID-CNN model has the highest financial distress prediction accuracy rate of 94.23%, and the lowest type I error rate and type II error rate, which are 0.96% and 4.81%, respectively.