Application of hybrid case-based reasoning for enhanced performance in bankruptcy prediction

Predicting business failure is an important and challenging issue that has served as an impetus for many academic studies over the past three decades. This study aims at developing CBR-based hybrid models of predicting business failure. The need to supplement CBR (Case-Based Reasoning) with other classification and diagnosis techniques is triggered by the fact that accuracy and effectiveness tend to get reduced when CBR alone is applied to handle too many attributes. To enhance the accuracy of bankruptcy prediction, the hybrid models developed by this study include: RST–CBR (combining Rough Set Theory with CBR), RST–GRA–CBR (integrating RST, Grey Relational Analysis, and CBR), and CART–CBR (combining Classification and Regression Tree with CBR). In order to verify the ability of the proposed models to achieve optimal accuracy rate, this study further compares the predictive ability of CBR with those of other comparative models.