Development of fuzzified neural network for enterprise bankruptcy risk estimation

Abstract

The object of this study is the assessment of the level of enterprise bankruptcy risk. It is a critical component in assessing the financial condition of an enterprise, and also serves as an indicator that allows the management team to reduce potential risks and develop their own strategies to strengthen the financial condition of the enterprise. One of the most challenging aspects of bankruptcy forecasting is the complex financial situations of bankrupt companies. By accurately predicting the risk of bankruptcy, businesses can take preventive measures to mitigate financial difficulties and ensure long-term sustainability. Previous methods, such as Altman's Z-score, are not accurate enough, as presented in the study. The paper investigates a modern approach to bankruptcy prediction based on a neural network with complex neural elements, namely neural arithmetic logic units (NALUs) and a custom phasing layer. This layer can process complex raw numerical values, such as financial indicators relevant to the analysis of a company's bankruptcy. Compared to Altman's Z-score, the developed method demonstrates a better F1 score in bankruptcy classification (48 %). On the raw data, the neural network demonstrates an improvement in the F1 score by about 40 % compared to the classical multilayer perceptron (MLP) with linear layers and nonlinear activation functions. A modern replacement for ReLU called Mish was used, which achieves better generalization. It was also assumed that the addition of new neural elements, which provide the neural network with arithmetic capabilities, contributes to the performance of processing non-normalized input data. This work highlights the importance of using advanced neural network architectures to improve the accuracy and reliability of forecasting in financial risk assessment. Using the parameters presented in the study, managers of enterprises will be able to more accurately assess the risk of bankruptcy.