Modeling and prediction of business success: a survey

Businesses are the driving force behind economic systems and are the lifeblood of the community. A business shares striking similarity to a living organism, including birth, infancy, rising, prosperity, and falling. The success of a business is not only important to the owners, but is also critical to the regional/domestic economic system, or even the global economy. Recent years have witnessed many new emerging businesses with tremendous success, such as Google, Apple, Facebook etc., yet millions of businesses also fail or fade out within a rather short period of time. Finding patterns/factors connected to the business rise and fall remains a long lasting question puzzling many economists, entrepreneurs, and government officials. Recent advancement in artificial intelligence, especially machine learning, has lend researchers powers to use data to model and predict business success. However, due to data driven nature of all machine learning methods, existing approaches are rather domain-driven and ad-hoc in their design and validations. In this paper, we propose a systematic review of modeling and prediction of business success. We first outline a triangle framework to showcase three parities connected to the business: Investment-Business-Market (IBM). After that, we align features into three main categories, each of which is focused on modeling a business from a particular perspective, such as sales, management, innovation etc., and further summarize different types of machine learning and deep learning methods for business modeling and prediction. The survey provides a comprehensive review of computational approaches for business performance modeling and prediction.