Chemical Engineering Transactions (Dec 2023)
A Rule-based Model for Predicting Airline Financial Performance from Environmental, Social, and Governance Data
Abstract
Environment, social, and governance (ESG) considerations have become a necessity for businesses. A company’s environmental and community initiatives have been found to greatly influence customer perception. This is even more critical for industries that are difficult to decarbonize like the aviation industry. There has been little investigation on the role of ESG strategies on company financial performance which can dictate the sustainability of initiative implementation. This work uses ESG performance indicators to develop a rule-based model for predicting company financial performance as measured by return on assets (ROA). Results suggest that the most critical attributes of the ESG framework are Innovation, Workforce, Human Rights, Product Responsibility, Shareholders, and the aggregate ESG score. The best–performing model correctly predicts 15 out of 28 of the validation data (53.57 %). A rule of interest is that which states IF (Human Rights = Average) THEN (ROA = Average). It had the highest coverage for both training and validation data with a certainty of 61 %, and a prediction accuracy of 71.4 %, highlighting the importance of Human Rights on firm value.