Utilization of forecasting accounting earning using artificial neural networks and case-based reasoning: Case study on manufacturing and banking industry

The financial statements purpose to provide useful information to decision-making process of business managers. The value-relevant information, however, embedded in the financial statement has been often overlooked in Korea. In fact, the financial statements in Korea have been utilized for nothing but account reports to Security Supervision Boards (SSB). The objective of this study is to develop earnings forecasting models through financial statement analysis using artificial intelligence (AI). AI methods are employed in forecasting earnings: artificial neural networks (ANN) for manufacturing industry and case-based reasoning (CBR) for banking industry. The experimental results using such AI methods are as follows. Using ANN for manufacturing industry records 63.2% of hit ratio for out-of-sample, which outperforms the logistic regression by around 4%. The experiment through CBR for banking industry shows 65.0% of hit ratio that beats the statistical method by 13.2% in holdout sample. Finally, the prediction results for manufacturing industry are validated through monitoring the shift in cumulative returns of portfolios based on the earning prediction. The portfolio with the firms whose earnings are predicted to increase is designated as best portfolio and the portfolio with the earnings-decreasing firms as worst portfolio. The difference between two portfolios is about 3% of cumulative abnormal return on average. Consequently, this result showed that the financial statements in Korea contain the value-relevant information that is not reflected in stock prices.