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The prediction of bankruptcy for financial companies, especially banks, has been extensively researched area and creditors, auditors, stockholders and senior managers are all interested in bank bankruptcy prediction. In this paper, three common machine learning models namely Logistic, J48 and Voted Perceptron are used as the base learners. In addition, an attribute-base ensemble learning method namely Random Subspaces and two instance-base ensemble learning methods namely Bagging and Multi-Boosting are employed to enhance the prediction accuracy of conventional machine learning models for bank failure prediction. The models are grouped in the following families of approaches: (i) conventional machine learning models, (ii) ensemble learning models and (iii) hybrid ensemble learning models. Experimental results indicate a clear outperformance of hybrid ensemble machine learning models over conventional base and ensemble models. These results indicate that hybrid ensemble learning models can be used as a reliable predicting model for bank failures.

Sovereign credit ratings have been a controversial issue since the outbreak of the 2008 financial crisis. Among the debates the inaccuracies stay at the centre. By employing classification and regression trees, multilayer perceptron, support vector machines (SVM), Bayes net, and naive Bayes; we compare the ability of various learning techniques with the conventional statistical method in predicting sovereign credit ratings. Experimental results suggest that all the techniques excluding SVM have over 90 % accurate prediction. According to within one and two notch accurate prediction measure, the prediction performance of SVM also increases above 90 %. These findings indicate a clear outperformance of AI methods over the conventional statistical method. The results have many implications for the practitioners in credit scoring industry. Amidst the regulatory measures that encourage individual credit scoring for international financial institutions, these findings suggest that up-to-date AI methods serve quite reliable technical tools to predict sovereign credit ratings.

The strong relationship between bank failure and economic growth attaches far more importance to the predictability of bank failures. Consequently, numerous statistical prediction models exist in the literature focusing on this particular subject. Besides, artificial intelligence techniques began to attain an increasing level of importance in the literature due to their predictive success. This study distinguishes itself from the similar ones in the sense that it presents a comparison of three different artificial intelligence methods, namely support vector machines (SVMs), radial basis function neural network (RBF-NN) and multilayer perceptrons (MLPs); in addition to subjecting the explanatory variables to principal component analysis (PCA). The extent of this study encompasses 37 privately owned commercial banks (17 failed, 20 non-failed) that were operating in Turkey for the period of 1997---2001. The main conclusions drawn from the study can be summarized as follows: (i) PCA does not appear to be an effective method with respect to the improvement of predictive power; (ii) SVMs and RBF demonstrated similar levels of predictive power; albeit SVMs was found to be the best model in terms of total predictive power; (iii) MLPs method stood out among the SVMs and RBF methods in a negative sense and exhibits the lowest predictive power.