Feature Transformation for Corporate Tax Default Prediction: Application of Machine Learning Approaches

Applications of machine learning (ML) and data science have extended significantly into contemporary accounting and finance. Yet, the prediction and analysis of taxpayers’ status are relatively untapped to date. Moreover, this paper focuses on the combination of feature transformation as a novel domain of research for corporate firms’ tax status prediction with the applicability of ML approaches. The paper also applies a tax payment dataset of Finish limited liability firms with failed and non-failed tax information. Seven different ML approaches train across four datasets, transformed to non-transformed, that effectively discriminate the non-default tax firms from their default counterparts. The findings advocate tax administration to choose the single best ML approach and feature transformation method for the execution purpose.