Modelling credit rating by fuzzy adaptive network

Human judgment plays an important role in the rating of enterprise financial conditions. The recently developed fuzzy adaptive network (FAN), which can handle systems whose behaviour is influenced by human judgment, appears to be ideally suited for the modelling of this credit rating problem. In this paper, FAN is used to model the credit rating of small financial enterprises. To illustrate the approach, the data of the credit rating problem is first represented by the use of fuzzy numbers. Then, the FAN network based on inference rules is constructed. And finally, the network is trained or learned by using the fuzzy number training data. The main advantages of the proposed network are the ability for linguistic representation, linguistic aggregation and the learning ability of the neural network. c © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.