Machine Learning for Identifying Risk in Financial Statements: A Survey

The work herein reviews the scientific literature on Machine Learning approaches for financial risk assessment using financial reports. We identify two prominent use cases that constitute fundamental risk factors for a company, namely misstatement detection and financial distress prediction. We further categorize the related work along four dimensions that can help highlight the peculiarities and challenges of the domain. Specifically, we group the related work based on (a) the input features used by each method, (b) the sources providing the labels of the data, (c) the evaluation approaches used to confirm the validity of the methods, and (d) the machine learning methods themselves. This categorization facilitates a technical overview of risk detection methods, revealing common patterns, methodologies, significant challenges, and opportunities for further research in the field.