Synchronization and control are two very important aspects of any dynamical systems. Among various kinds of nonlinear systems, competitive neural network holds a very important place due to its application in diverse fields. The model is general enough to include, as subclass, the most famous neural network models such as competitive neural networks, cellular neural networks and Hopfield neural networks. In this paper, the problem of feedback controller design to guarantee synchronization for competitive neural networks with time-varying delays is investigated. The goal of this work is to derive an existent criterion of the controller for the exponential synchronization between drive and response neutral-type competitive neural networks with time-varying delays. The method used in this brief is based on feedback control gain matrix by using the Lyapunov stability theory. The synchronization conditions are given in terms of LMIs. To the best of our knowledge, the results presented here are novel and generalize some previous results. Some numerical simulations are also represented graphically to validate the effectiveness and advantages of our theoretical results.

The present paper aims to compare the predictive performance of five models namely the Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Logistic Regression (LR), Decision Trees (DT), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Random Forest (RF) to forecast the bankruptcy of Tunisian companies. A Deep Neural Network (DNN) model is also applied to conduct a prediction performance comparison with other statistical and machine learning algorithms. The data used for this empirical investigation covers 25 financial ratios for a large sample of 732 Tunisian companies from 2011–2017. To interpret the prediction results, three performance measures have been employed; the accuracy percentage, the F1 score, and the Area Under Curve (AUC). In conclusion, DNN shows higher accuracy in predicting bankruptcy compared to other conventional models, whereas the random forest performs better than other machine learning and statistical methods.