Detection of fraudulent financial statements using the hybrid data mining approach

The purpose of this study is to construct a valid and rigorous fraudulent financial statement detection model. The research objects are companies which experienced both fraudulent and non-fraudulent financial statements between the years 2002 and 2013. In the first stage, two decision tree algorithms, including the classification and regression trees (CART) and the Chi squared automatic interaction detector (CHAID) are applied in the selection of major variables. The second stage combines CART, CHAID, Bayesian belief network, support vector machine and artificial neural network in order to construct fraudulent financial statement detection models. According to the results, the detection performance of the CHAID–CART model is the most effective, with an overall accuracy of 87.97 % (the FFS detection accuracy is 92.69 %).