The Sensitivity of machine learning techniques to variations in sample sizea comparative analysis
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Universidad de Oviedo
info
ISSN: 1577-8517
Year of publication: 2002
Volume: 2
Issue: 4
Pages: 131-155
Type: Article
More publications in: The International Journal of Digital Accounting Research
Abstract
A comparative analysis of the performance of some well-known classification techniques (Discriminant Analysis, Quinlan's See5, and Neural Networks) and certain machine learning systems of recent development (ARNI, FAN and SVM) is conducted. The chosen classification task is the forecasting of the level of efficiency of Spanish commercial and industrial companies. Assignment of the firms is made upon the basis of a set of financial ratios, which make a high dimension feature space with low separability degree. In the present research the effects on the accuracy of variations of each technique in the estimation sample size are measured. The main results suggest that ARNI and See5 yield the best results, even with small sample sizes.