Detecting stock market manipulation via machine learning: Evidence from China Securities Regulatory Commission punishment cases

In this paper, we apply machine-learning techniques to construct detecting models of stock market manipulation. By combining manually collected China Securities Regulatory Commission punishment cases from 2014 to 2016 with financial information of listed companies, we construct a training set and a test set to compare the detecting ability of support vector machine (SVM) and logistic model. Considering imbalanced data, we further incorporate Borderline Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (Borderline SMOTE) to oversample minority class and then find that Borderline SMOTE–SVM performs better than SVM and benchmark model in detecting manipulation. To enhance detecting performance of the models, we innovatively introduce market sentiment indicators which are extracted from analyst rating reports, financial news, and Guba comments into our indicators set. The results indicate that the new indicators generate significant marginal increment to the model accuracy.