Measuring and managing the financial sustainability of the borrowers is crucial to financial institutions for their risk management. As a result, building an effective corporate financial distress prediction model has been an important research topic for a long time. Recently, researchers are exerting themselves to improve the accuracy of financial distress prediction models by applying various business analytics approaches including statistical and artificial intelligence methods. Among them, support vector machines (SVMs) are becoming popular. SVMs require only small training samples and have little possibility of overfitting if model parameters are properly tuned. Nonetheless, SVMs generally show high prediction accuracy since it can deal with complex nonlinear patterns. Despite of these advantages, SVMs are often criticized because their architectural factors are determined by heuristics, such as the parameters of a kernel function and the subsets of appropriate features and instances. In this study, we propose globally optimized SVMs, denoted by GOSVM, a novel hybrid SVM model designed to optimize feature selection, instance selection, and kernel parameters altogether. This study introduces genetic algorithm (GA) in order to simultaneously optimize multiple heterogeneous design factors of SVMs. Our study applies the proposed model to the real-world case for predicting financial distress. Experiments show that the proposed model significantly improves the prediction accuracy of conventional SVMs.

Demand for context-aware systems continues to grow due to the diffusion of mobile devices. This trend may represent good market opportunities for mobile service industries. Thus, context-aware or location-based advertising (LBA) has been an interesting marketing tool for many companies. However, some studies reported that the performance of context-aware marketing or advertising has been quite disappointing. In this study, we propose a novel context-aware recommender system for LBA. Our proposed model is designed to apply a modified collaborative filtering (CF) algorithm with regard to the several dimensions for the personalization of mobile devices – location, time and the user’s needs type. In particular, we employ a classification rule to understand user’s needs type using a decision tree algorithm. We empirically validated the effectiveness of the proposed model by using a real-world dataset. Experimental results show that our model makes more accurate and satisfactory advertisements than comparative systems.