GA-based Normalization Approach in Back-propagation Neural Network for Bankruptcy Prediction Modeling

The back-propagation neural network (BPN) has long been successfully applied in bankruptcy prediction problems. Despite its wide application, some major issues must be considered before its use, such as the network topology, learning parameters and normalization methods for the input and output vectors. Previous studies on bankruptcy prediction with BPN have shown that many researchers are interested in how to optimize the network topology and learning parameters to improve the prediction performance. In many cases, however, the benefits of data normalization are often overlooked. In this study, a genetic algorithm (GA)-based normalization transform, which is defined as a linearly weighted combination of several different normalization transforms, will be proposed. GA is used to extract the optimal weight for the generalization. From the results of an experiment, the proposed method was evaluated and compared with other methods to demonstrate the advantage of the proposed method.