A Hybrid Deep Learning Model to Predict Business Closure from Reviews and User Attributes Using Sentiment Aligned Topic Model

Business closure is a very good indicator for success or failure of a business. This will help investors and banks as to whether to invest or lend to a particular business for future growth and benefits. Traditional machine learning techniques require extensive manual feature engineering and still do not perform satisfactorily due to significant class imbalance problem and little difference in the attributes for open and closed businesses. We have used historical data besides taking care of the class imbalance problem. Transfer learning also has been used to tackle the issue of having small categorical datasets. A hybrid deep learning model has been proposed to predict whether a business would be shut down within a specific period of time. Sentiment Aligned Topic Model (SATM) is used to extract aspect-wise sentiment scores from user reviews. Our results show a marked improvement over traditional machine learning techniques. It also shows how the aspect-wise sentiment scores corresponding to each business, computed using SATM, help to give better results.