Journal Screenshot

International Journal of Academic Research in Accounting, Finance and Management Sciences

Open Access Journal

ISSN: 2225-8329

Financial Distress Prediction of Foreign Trade Listed Companies in China Based on the Hybrid Model of Lasso-SMOTE-XGBoost-SHAP

Po Yun, Yifei Xu, Jingwei Zhang, Tong Ning

http://dx.doi.org/10.6007/IJARAFMS/v16-i3/28662

Open access

Persistent turbulence in the global trade product severe uncertainties in the operation and financial sustainability of listed foreign trade enterprises. To accurately identify and forecast the financial distress and suggest risk management support for corporate decision-making, this paper takes Chinese A-share listed foreign trade firms spanning 2005 to 2025 as research objects, constructs a multi-dimensional indicator system combining financial and non-financial metrics, and further develops a hybrid Lasso-SMOTE-XGBoost-SHAP model for financial distress prediction. Specifically, Least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (Lasso) regression is used to multi-dimensional feature screening, the synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE) solve the sample class imbalance problems, eXtreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) realizes binary distress classification; and the shapley additive exPlanations (SHAP) quantifies each feature’s marginal contribution and influence direction. The results suggest that comparative experiments verify the outstanding performance of the proposed integrated model. When trained on the dataset that incorporates both financial and non-financial indicators, the model achieves precision of 0.9574, accuracy of 0.9617, recall of 0.9663, F1-score of 0.9618 and an AUC value of 0.9279, surpassing other four benchmark models. SHAP confirms that type of audit opinion, Debt-to-Tangible-Assets Ratio are core risk predictors, proving audit and governance information delivers substantial incremental early-warning capacity.

Abrahamsen, N. G. B., Nylén-Forthun, E., Møller, M., de Lange, P. E., & Risstad, M. (2024). Financial distress prediction in the nordics: Early warnings from machine learning models. Journal of Risk and Financial Management, 17(10), 432. https://doi.org/10.3390/jrfm17100432
Altman,E.I..(1968). Financial ratios, discriminant analysis and the prediction of corporate bankruptcy. Journal of Finance, 23(4), 589-609. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6261.1968.tb00843.x?
Beaver, W. H.. (1966).Financial ratios as predictors of failure. Journal of Accounting Research, 4: 71-111. https://doi.org/10.2307/2490171?
Bentejac, C., Csorgo, A., Martinez-Munoz, G..(2021) .A comparative analysis of gradient boosting algorithms. Artificial Intelligence Review, 54: 1937-1967. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-020-09896-5
Chawla, N. V. , Bowyer, K. W. , Hall, L. O. , & Kegelmeyer, W. P. . (2002). Smote: synthetic minority over-sampling technique. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 16(1), 321-357. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1106.1813
Chen, T., Guestrin, C..(2016). XGBoost: A scalable tree boosting system. Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining,785-794. https://doi.org/10.1145/2939672.2939785
Elreedy, D., Atiya, A. F.,Kamalov, F..(2024). A theoretical distribution analysis of synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE) for imbalanced learning. Machine Learning, 113(7): 4903-4923. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10994-022-06296-4
Gao, R., Cui, S., Wang, Y., & Xu, W. (2025). Predicting financial distress in high-dimensional imbalanced datasets: a multi-heterogeneous self-paced ensemble learning framework. Financial Innovation, 11(1), 50. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40854-024-00745-w
Habib, A., Costa, M. D., Huang, H. J., Bhuiyan, M. B. U., & Sun, L.. (2020). Determinants and consequences of financial distress: review of the empirical literature. Accounting & Finance, 60, 1023-1075. https://doi.org/10.1111/acfi.12400
Jie, S. , Hui, L. , Hamido, F. , Binbin, F. , & Wenguo, A. . (2020). Class-imbalanced dynamic financial distress prediction based on adaboost-svm ensemble combined with smote and time weighting. Information Fusion, 54, 17. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.inffus.2019.07.006?
Li, H., Wu, W.. (2024). Loan default predictability with explainable machine learning. Finance Research Letters, 60: 104867. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4616971?
Li, Z. , Crook, J. , Andreeva, G. , & Tang, Y. . (2020). Predicting the risk of financial distress using corporate governance measures. Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, 101334. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pacfin.2020.101334?
Lokanan, M. E., & Ramzan, S. (2024). Predicting financial distress in TSX-listed firms using machine learning algorithms. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 7, 1466321. https://doi.org/10.3389/frai.2024.1466321?
Lu, X., Ma, J., & Zhang, H. (2023). Asymmetric feature interaction for interpreting model predictions. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, 4666-4678. https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.286/
Moscatelli, M. , Parlapiano, F. , Narizzano, S. , & Viggiano, G. . (2020). Corporate default forecasting with machine learning. Expert Systems with Applications, 161, 113567. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2020.113567?
Muñoz-Izquierdo, N. , Laitinen, E. , Camacho-Miano, M. , & Pascual-Ezama, D. . (2020). Does audit report information improve financial distress prediction over altman's traditional z?score model?.Journal of International Financial Management & Accounting,31(1): 65-97. https://doi.org/10.1111/jifm.12110?
Nurcahyono, N., Sinarasri, A., Pamungkas, I. D., & Hanum, A. N. (2025). May intellectual capital and corporate governance reduce the probability of financial distress?. Contaduria y Administracion, 70(1), 1-25. https://doi.org/10.22201/fca.24488410e.2025.5169?
Qian, H. , Wang, B. , Yuan, M. , Gao, S. , & Song, Y. . (2022). Financial distress prediction using a corrected feature selection measure and gradient boosted decision tree. Expert Systems with Applications, 190, 116202. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2021.116202?
Sethi, P., Singh, A., & Gupta, V. (2026). Predicting Financial Distress Using Machine Learning Techniques. Asia-Pacific Financial Markets, 33(2), 857. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10690-025-09525-7?
Song, Y., Jiang, M., Li, S., & Zhao, S. (2024). Class?imbalanced financial distress prediction with machine learning: Incorporating financial, management, textual, and social responsibility features into index system. Journal of Forecasting, 43(3), 593-614. https://doi.org/10.1002/for.3050?
Sun, J., Zhao, M., & Li, N. (2026). ESG performance and corporate financial distress: Evidence from China. Finance Research Letters, 110038. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.frl.2026.110038?
Tibshirani, R. . (1996). Regression shrinkage and selection via the lasso. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, 58(1): 267-288. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2517-6161.1996.tb02080.x
Yang, H., Li, E., Cai, Y. F., Li, J., & Yuan, G. X. (2021). The extraction of early warning features for predicting financial distress based on XGBoost model and shap framework. International Journal of Financial Engineering, 8(3), 2141004.https://doi.org/10.1142/S2424786321410048
Zhang, T., Zhu, W., Wu, Y., Wu, Z., Zhang, C., & Hu, X. (2023). An explainable financial risk early warning model based on the DS-XGBoost model. Finance Research Letters, 56, 104045. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.frl.2023.104045?

Yun, P., Xu, Y., Zhang, J., & Ning, T. (2026). Financial Distress Prediction of Foreign Trade Listed Companies in China Based on the Hybrid Model of Lasso-SMOTE-XGBoost-SHAP. International Journal of Academic Research in Accounting, Finance and Management Sciences, 16(3), 222–242.