A Data Mining Approach for Determining the Most Affecting Factors on Information Disclosure in Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE)

Disclosure quality is very important to listed companies and capital market. There has been considerable research in respect of voluntary disclosure by companies and factors that may explain such disclosure. The information disclosure status of listed companies is hard to be evaluated by investors. For more informed decision, Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE) announces the ranking of companies due to their information disclosure every year. But understanding the most important factors affecting the companie's information disclosure is impossible. The aim of this research is to explore the hidden knowledge of information disclosure status among the listed companies in TSE. For this reason, the most important national and international papers have been survived and factors influencing disclosure were collected. With applying of data mining approach, particularly the “C5.0 decision tree algorithm”, the most important factors are extracted and the rules are sorted by ACS (Antecedent size-Confidence-Support) method. It is worth noting that the resulting rule set is attributable as an expert system.