A Multi-Head LSTM Architecture for Bankruptcy Prediction with Time Series Accounting Data

With the recent advances in machine learning (ML), several models have been successfully applied to financial and accounting data to predict the likelihood of companies’ bankruptcy. However, time series have received little attention in the literature, with a lack of studies on the application of deep learning sequence models such as Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and the recent Attention-based models in general. In this research work, we investigated the application of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks to exploit time series of accounting data for bankruptcy prediction. The main contributions of our work are the following: (a) We proposed a multi-head LSTM that models each financial variable in a time window independently and compared it with a single-input LSTM and other traditional ML models. The multi-head LSTM outperformed all the other models. (b) We identified the optimal time series length for bankruptcy prediction to be equal to 4 years of accounting data. (c) We made public the dataset we used for the experiments which includes data from 8262 different public companies in the American stock market generated in the period between 1999 and 2018. Furthermore, we proved the efficacy of the multi-head LSTM model in terms of fewer false positives and the better division of the two classes.