Combining data and text mining techniques for analysing financial reports

There is a vast amount of financial information on companies’ financial performance available to investors today. While automatic analysis of financial figures is common, it has been difficult to automatically extract meaning from the textual part of financial reports. The textual part of an annual report contains richer information than the financial ratios. In this paper, we combine data mining methods for analyzing quantitative and qualitative data from financial reports, in order to see if the textual part of the report contains some indication about future financial performance. The quantitative analysis has been performed using selforganizing maps, and the qualitative analysis using prototype-matching text clustering. The analysis is performed on the quarterly reports of three leading companies in the telecommunications sector.

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