Analysis of World Bank indicators for countries with banking crises by subgroup discovery induction

The paper presents results of the analysis of countries that experienced banking crises in the period 1976-2011. The analysed data are World Bank indicators in the periods before the onset of the crises. The work is done as part of the EU FP7 project “Forecasting Financial Crises”. For the analysis we have used the subgroup discovery methodology, which is especially useful when different subtypes of the main concept are anticipated and when different, possibly even contradictory properties may characterize these subtypes. We describe the data preparation process and the Data Mining Server application for subgroup discovery induction. The applied methodology may also be useful for other applications in business and marketing domains. Our main result is the classification of five subsets of countries with banking crises. Three of them may be recognized as financially driven types of banking crises, while significant socio-economic problems are characteristic for the remaining two subgroups.