Appraisal of companies with Bayesian networks

Appraisal of companies is an important business activity. We mainly apply Bayesian networks for this classification task for Japanese electric company data. Firstly, few standard statistical techniques are performed. Then Bayesian networks are applied in four steps: (1) for implementing a current procedure of economical experts, where economical variables are clustered and then summarised for computing a score for deciding the economical state of the company, (2) the same is done but with clustering of economical variables based on data, (3) the naive Bayes classifier and (4) an improved naive Bayes classifier through adjusting its conditional density of each feature variable given the class variable, which are initially obtained by maximum likelihood estimation. Adjustments are done by using the simulated annealing optimisation. Finally, a sensible way for appraisal of companies is discussed.