An evidential analysis of Altman Z-score for financial predictions: Case study on solar energy companies

Altman Z-score has been a well-accepted model of predicting survivals and failures of manufactures since 1968. However, short of an underpinning theory causes a wide gap between asking and responding sides, which still has no effective solution. This research proposes a rough set approach to inducing granular evidence and solving evidential coefficients of financial ratios for the distressed companies. Empirically, the proposed approach is applied to a financial database, Taiwan Economic Journal, to analyze the solar energy industry during 2009-2014. The result shows the inferential evidence successfully serves as a basis for financial analysis and discloses that the profit efficiency of the distressed companies in Taiwan's solar energy industry had been declining. (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V.