Generating Firm's Performance Indicators by Applying PCA

There have been many studies on statistical forecasting on firm`s performance and stock price by applying various financial indicators such as debt ratio and sales growth rate. Selecting predictors for constructing a prediction model among the various financial indicators is very important for precise prediction. Most of the previous studies applied variable selection algorithms for selecting predictors. However, the variable selection algorithm is considered to be at risk of eliminating certain amount of information from the indicators that were excluded from model construction. Therefore, we propose a firm`s performance prediction model which principal component analysis is applied instead of the variable selection algorithm, in order to reduce dimensionality of input variables of the prediction model. In this study, we constructed the proposed prediction model by using financial data of American IT companies to empirically analyze prediction performance of the model.