A Rulebase Business Success versus Failure Apriori Prediction Model: A Case of Iranian Start-Ups

In the current economy and entrepreneurship situation in developing countries, experts maintain that establishing startup companies proves an efficient and promising approach. In spite of the fact, many startup companies are failed. However, there are key factors, which can help such companies follow the path to success. This research aims to identify the factors, which led to success of startup companies in Iran. Accordingly, one of the important roles of data mining is exploring the relationship between datasets, and getting the result of a series of association-based rules for identifying the strong relations between business activities. The data of this study is collected from a total of 165 Iranian startup companies. The feature's columns included 41 success factors of startup companies addressed in domestic and foreign studies. For the prediction phase, we use the help of support vector machine algorithm, decision tree and k-nearest neighboring to classification. The feature selection technique in order to come up with the most efficient success factor of startup companies is Cuckoo search. Finally, rules are extracted by means of Apriori Algorithms. The results indicate that factors such as, namely, entrepreneurship experience, working duration, skills, type of service or product, target market, Blue Ocean or Red Ocean strategy, flexibility, scalability, customer loyalty, presence or lack of presence in an accelerator, and first-stage of investor are the most important factors that have the greatest effects in a startup's success. Moreover, the extracted results reveal that flexibility, and scalability are considered as two key factors contributing to success of Iranian startup companies.