The operating status of an enterprise is disclosed periodically in a financial statement. As a result, investors
usually only get information about the financial distress a company may be in after the formal financial
statement has been published. If company executives intentionally package financial statements with
the purpose of hiding the actual status of the company, then investors will have even less chance of
obtaining the real financial information. For example, a company can manipulate its current ratio by
up to 200% so that its liquidity deficiency will not show up as a financial distress in the short run. To
improve the accuracy of the financial distress prediction model, this paper adopted the operating rules
of the Taiwan stock exchange corporation (TSEC) which were violated by those companies that were subsequently
stopped and suspended, as the range of the analysis of this research. In addition, this paper also
used financial ratios, other non-financial ratios, and factor analysis to extract adaptable variables. Moreover,
the artificial neural network (ANN) and data mining (DM) techniques were used to construct the
financial distress prediction model. The empirical experiment with a total of 37 ratios and 68 listed companies
as the initial samples obtained a satisfactory result, which testifies for the feasibility and validity
of our proposed methods for the financial distress prediction of listed companies.
This paper makes four critical contributions: (1) The more factor analysis we used, the less accuracy we
obtained by the ANN and DM approach. (2) The closer we get to the actual occurrence of financial distress,
the higher the accuracy we obtain, with an 82.14% correct percentage for two seasons prior to
the occurrence of financial distress. (3) Our empirical results show that factor analysis increases the error
of classifying companies that are in a financial crisis as normal companies. (4) By developing a financial
distress prediction model, the ANN approach obtains better prediction accuracy than the DM clustering
approach. Therefore, this paper proposes that the artificial intelligent (AI) approach could be a more suitable
methodology than traditional statistics for predicting the potential financial distress of a company.