“…We also contribute to the literature on the application of machine learning in finance and accounting research. Recent studies have tested the performance of machine learning in asset pricing (e.g., Rapach, Strauss, Tu, and Zhou, 2019;Gu et al, 2020), fraud prediction (e.g., Bao, Ke, Li, Yu, and Zhang, 2020), and insurance loss prediction (e.g., Ding, Lev, Peng, Sun, and Vasarhelyi, 2020). We contribute to the literature by providing a comparative study on one of the 7 most important research questions in fundamental analysis, corporate earnings forecasting.…”