A Predictive Business Ranking System: For Local Businesses

To predict the performance of small scale local businesses is a complex problem. Local businesses directly contribute to the overall financial growth of a location or region. The main objective of this research is to develop a model that will provide valuable guidance to entrepreneurs aspiring to enter into the local businesses. Often, small scale businesses is a neglected area due to smaller amounts of turn over associated; but a group of local businesses in a city as a cluster may generate the turnover equivalent to the turnover of a mid-size organization. Machine learning techniques have shown promises in almost all the areas today. In this research, a feed forward neural network is designed to generate forecasts about the financial returns of the local businesses. Not only it predicts the future of the existing businesses, but also provides numerical predictions about the new businesses in the form of profitability ratios for the next financial year.