Exploratory Graphics of a Financial Dataset

Abstract

The first stages of any data analysis are to get to know the aims of the study and to get to know the data. In this study the main goal is to predict a company’s chances of going bankrupt based on its recent financial returns. In another chapter of the Handbook, some sophisticated prediction models based on support vector machines are discussed for a similar dataset. Here, visualization methods are used to explore the large dataset of American company accounts that was made available for predicting bankruptcy in order to get to know the data and to assess the quality of the dataset. This is an initial exploratory analysis that does not use any expert accounting knowledge.