“…Many methodologies have been developed in recent years which analyze the external rating process such as linear regression (Horrigan, 1966;West, 1970), linear discriminant analysis (Pinches and Mingo, 1973, 1975), logit and probit (Altman and Katz, 1976Jackson and Boyd, 1988) ordered logit and ordered probit (Kamstra et al, 2001;Altman and Rijken, 2004;Amato and Furfine, 2004;Alejandro and Analía, 2008;Bellotti et al, 2011b), artificial intelligence techniques (Dutta and Shekhar, 1988;Surkan and Singleton, 1990;Kim et al, 1993;Kwon et al, 1997). Kim (2005), Huang et al (2004) and Lee (2007) show that artificial intelligence techniques (particularly neural networks and support vector machines) do not provide superior predictions of bond ratings compared with standard ordered-choice methods.…”