3 Dataset Overview, Preprocessing, and Features
3.1 Successful Companies Dataset and 3.2 Unsuccessful Companies Dataset
4 Model Training, Evaluation, and Portfolio Simulation and 4.1 Backtest
5 Other approaches
5.2 Founders ranking model and 5.3 Unicorn recommendation model
7 Further Research, References and Appendix
All investors could be scored in terms of frequency, amount, and field of investments. Also, an investor could be an indicator of a company’s potential failure or success. This scoring was carried out in three stages:
Through an autoencoder model with several modalities, we created vector representations for each investor
According to experts’ estimates, we select a group of top investors, and further create the centroid of this group in the vector space
We rank investors according to distance from the centroid
An elevated score corresponds to a proximate alignment with top investors. Results are presented in Table 4. If the lead investor of a company has a low score, it could be an indicator that such a company should be excluded from consideration.
Example: Company 14W has a score of 0.9 and invests in IT companies, incl. unicorns (for example, European travel management startup TravelPerk).