Artificial neural networks applications in economics and management research: An exploratory literature review

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to expand the range of earlier surveys and provide an exploratory literature review of artificial neural networks applications in economics and management research. Our analysis covers 1106 research papers and includes: 1) a study of articles distribution across years and journals; 2) terms frequency analysis using word cloud visualization of keywords and words in titles; 3) co-occurrences analysis through a study of keywords and words in titles networks; and 4) topic modeling using latent dirichlet allocation (LDA) algorithm. Our investigation revealed that the majority (38%) of the examined research papers were published in Expert Systems with Applications. The number of research papers noticeably increased and reached a peak in 2009 with 107 published articles. Topic modeling using LDA algorithm on our corpus suggests seven application areas: marketing and customer relationship management, performance analysis and scoring, banking and financial risks, environmental economics, economic time series forecasting, project and production management, and finally financial markets.