Visualizing Indicators of Debt Crises in a Lower Dimension: A Self-Organizing Maps Approach

Since the 1980s, two severe global waves of sovereign defaults have occurred in less developed countries (LDCs): the LDC defaults in the 1980s and the LDC defaults at the turn of the 21st century. To date, the topic is contemporary, while the forecasting and monitoring results of debt crises are still at a preliminary stage. This chapter explores whether the application of the Self-Organizing Map (SOM), a neural network-based visualization tool, facilitates the monitoring of multidimensional financial data. Thus, this chapter presents a SOM model for visualizing the evolution of sovereign debt crises’ indicators. The results of this chapter indicate that the SOM is a feasible tool for visualization of early warning signals of sovereign defaults. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61350-116-0.ch017