Multimodal Generative Models for Bankruptcy Prediction Using Textual Data

Abstract: Textual data from financial filings, e.g., the Management's Discussion & Analysis (MDA) section in Form 10-K, has been used to improve the prediction accuracy of bankruptcy models. In practice, however, we cannot obtain the MDA section for all public companies, which limits the use of MDA data in traditional bankruptcy models, as they need complete data to make predictions. The two main reasons for the lack of MDA are: (i) not all companies are obliged to submit the MDA and (ii) technical problems arise when crawling and scrapping the MDA section. To solve this limitation, this research introduces the Conditional Multimodal Discriminative (CMMD) model that learns multimodal representations that embed information from accounting, market, and textual data modalities. The CMMD model needs a sample with all data modalities for model training. At test time, the CMMD model only needs access to accounting and market modalities to generate multimodal representations, which are further used to make bankruptcy predictions and to generate words from the missing MDA modality. With this novel methodology, it is realistic to use textual data in bankruptcy prediction models, since accounting and market data are available for all companies, unlike textual data. The empirical results of this research show that if financial regulators, or investors, were to use traditional models using MDA data, they would only be able to make predictions for 60% of the companies. Furthermore, the classification performance of our proposed methodology is superior to that of a large number of traditional classifier models, taking into account all the companies in our sample.