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Business failure prediction from textual and tabular data with sentence-level interpretations

Henri Arno (UGent) , Klaas Mulier (UGent) , Joke Baeck (UGent) and Thomas Demeester (UGent)
(2025) ANNALS OF OPERATIONS RESEARCH. 353(2). p.667-692
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Abstract
Business failure prediction models are crucial in high-stakes domains like banking, insurance, and investing. In this paper, we propose an interpretable model that combines numerical and sentence-level textual features through a well-known attention mechanism. Our model demonstrates competitive performance across various metrics, and the attention weights help identify sentences intuitively linked to business failure, offering a form of interpretability. Furthermore, our findings highlight the strength of traditional financial ratios for business failure prediction while textual data-particularly when represented as keywords-is mainly useful to correctly classify corporate disclosures where the possibility of failure is explicitly mentioned.
Keywords
Decision support systems, Business failure prediction, Natural language processing, Text analytics, FINANCIAL RATIOS, BANKRUPTCY PREDICTION, LEARNING-MODELS, DISCLOSURE, DISTRESS

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MLA
Arno, Henri, et al. “Business Failure Prediction from Textual and Tabular Data with Sentence-Level Interpretations.” ANNALS OF OPERATIONS RESEARCH, vol. 353, no. 2, 2025, pp. 667–92, doi:10.1007/s10479-025-06574-z.
APA
Arno, H., Mulier, K., Baeck, J., & Demeester, T. (2025). Business failure prediction from textual and tabular data with sentence-level interpretations. ANNALS OF OPERATIONS RESEARCH, 353(2), 667–692. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-025-06574-z
Chicago author-date
Arno, Henri, Klaas Mulier, Joke Baeck, and Thomas Demeester. 2025. “Business Failure Prediction from Textual and Tabular Data with Sentence-Level Interpretations.” ANNALS OF OPERATIONS RESEARCH 353 (2): 667–92. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-025-06574-z.
Chicago author-date (all authors)
Arno, Henri, Klaas Mulier, Joke Baeck, and Thomas Demeester. 2025. “Business Failure Prediction from Textual and Tabular Data with Sentence-Level Interpretations.” ANNALS OF OPERATIONS RESEARCH 353 (2): 667–692. doi:10.1007/s10479-025-06574-z.
Vancouver
1.
Arno H, Mulier K, Baeck J, Demeester T. Business failure prediction from textual and tabular data with sentence-level interpretations. ANNALS OF OPERATIONS RESEARCH. 2025;353(2):667–92.
IEEE
[1]
H. Arno, K. Mulier, J. Baeck, and T. Demeester, “Business failure prediction from textual and tabular data with sentence-level interpretations,” ANNALS OF OPERATIONS RESEARCH, vol. 353, no. 2, pp. 667–692, 2025.
@article{01JSP0JPGD6Z6MFE5BN15QQ4QT,
  abstract     = {{Business failure prediction models are crucial in high-stakes domains like banking, insurance, and investing. In this paper, we propose an interpretable model that combines numerical and sentence-level textual features through a well-known attention mechanism. Our model demonstrates competitive performance across various metrics, and the attention weights help identify sentences intuitively linked to business failure, offering a form of interpretability. Furthermore, our findings highlight the strength of traditional financial ratios for business failure prediction while textual data-particularly when represented as keywords-is mainly useful to correctly classify corporate disclosures where the possibility of failure is explicitly mentioned.}},
  author       = {{Arno, Henri and Mulier, Klaas and Baeck, Joke and Demeester, Thomas}},
  issn         = {{0254-5330}},
  journal      = {{ANNALS OF OPERATIONS RESEARCH}},
  keywords     = {{Decision support systems,Business failure prediction,Natural language processing,Text analytics,FINANCIAL RATIOS,BANKRUPTCY PREDICTION,LEARNING-MODELS,DISCLOSURE,DISTRESS}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  number       = {{2}},
  pages        = {{667--692}},
  title        = {{Business failure prediction from textual and tabular data with sentence-level interpretations}},
  url          = {{http://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-025-06574-z}},
  volume       = {{353}},
  year         = {{2025}},
}

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