Topological pattern discovery and feature extraction for fraudulent financial reporting

•We discover the spatial relationships of fraud and non-fraud financial statements.•An expert-competitive feature extraction mechanism is presented to capture the salient characteristics of fraud behaviors.•We design a parameter adjustment method to develop the classifiers in topological space.•The proposed method can generate classification rules to help detect fraudulent samples.

Fraudulent financial reporting (FFR) involves conscious efforts to mislead others regarding the financial condition of a business. It usually consists of deliberate actions to deceive regulators, investors or the general public that also hinder systematic approaches from effective detection. The challenge comes from distinguishing dichotomous samples that have their major attributes falling in the same distribution. This study pioneers a novel dual GHSOM (Growing Hierarchical Self-Organizing Map) approach to discover the topological patterns of FFR, achieving effective FFR detection and feature extraction. Specifically, the proposed approach uses fraudulent samples and non-fraudulent samples to train a pair of dual GHSOMs under the same training parameters and examines the hypotheses for counterpart relationships among their subgroups taking advantage of unsupervised learning nature and growing hierarchical structures from GHSOMs. This study further presents (1) an effective classification rule to detect FFR based on the topological patterns and (2) an expert-competitive feature extraction mechanism to capture the salient characteristics of fraud behaviors. The experimental results against 762 annual financial statements from 144 public-traded companies in Taiwan (out of which 72 are fraudulent and 72 are non-fraudulent) reveal that the topological pattern of FFR follows the non-fraud-central spatial relationship, as well as shows the promise of using the topological patterns for FFR detection and feature extraction.