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Marco Schreyer
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Schreyer
First name
Marco
Email
marco.schreyer@unisg.ch
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+41 71 224 79 13
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1 - 10 of 16
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PublicationType: journal articleJournal: Expert FocusVolume: Special: Internal AuditIssue: 01
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PublicationType: journal articleJournal: Expert FocusVolume: Special: Interne RevisionIssue: 01
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PublicationType: journal articleJournal: Expert FocusIssue: 04
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PublicationType: journal articleJournal: Expert FocusIssue: 02
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PublicationType: journal articleJournal: Expert FocusVolume: 2020Issue: 09
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PublicationFinDiff: Diffusion Models for Financial Tabular Data Generation(Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 2023)
;Timur Sattarov ;Damian BorthTimur SattarovThe sharing of microdata, such as fund holdings and derivative instruments, by regulatory institutions presents a unique challenge due to strict data confidentiality and privacy regulations. These challenges often hinder the ability of both academics and practitioners to conduct collaborative research effectively. The emergence of generative models, particularly diffusion models, capable of synthesizing data mimicking the underlying distributions of real-world data presents a compelling solution. This work introduces 'FinDiff', a diffusion model designed to generate real-world financial tabular data for a variety of regulatory downstream tasks, for example economic scenario modeling, stress tests, and fraud detection. The model uses embedding encodings to model mixed modality financial data, comprising both categorical and numeric attributes. The performance of FinDiff in generating synthetic tabular financial data is evaluated against state-of-the-art baseline models using three real-world financial datasets (including two publicly available datasets and one proprietary dataset). Empirical results demonstrate that FinDiff excels in generating synthetic tabular financial data with high fidelity, privacy, and utility.Type: conference paperJournal: 4th ACM International Conference on AI in Finance -
PublicationContinual Learning for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection in Continuous Auditing of Financial Accounting Data(Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2022-02-28)International audit standards require the direct assessment of a financial statement’s underlying accounting journal entries. Driven by advances in artificial intelligence, deep-learning inspired audit techniques emerged to examine vast quantities of journal entry data. However, in regular audits, most of the proposed methods are applied to learn from a comparably stationary journal entry population, e.g., of a financial quarter or year. Ignoring situations where audit relevant distribution changes are not evident in the training data or become incrementally available over time. In contrast, in continuous auditing, deep-learning models are continually trained on a stream of recorded journal entries, e.g., of the last hour. Resulting in situations where previous knowledge interferes with new information and will be entirely overwritten. This work proposes a continual anomaly detection framework to overcome both challenges and designed to learn from a stream of journal entry data experiences. The framework is evaluated based on deliberately designed audit scenarios and two real-world datasets. Our experimental results provide initial evidence that such a learning scheme offers the ability to reduce false-positive alerts and false-negative decisions.Type: conference paper
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PublicationFederated Continual Learning to Detect Accounting Anomalies in Financial Auditing( 2022-12-02)Vasarhelyi, Miklos A.The International Standards on Auditing (ISA) require auditors to collect reasonable assurance that financial statements are free of material misstatement. At the same time, a central objective of Continuous Assurance is the real-time assessment of digital accounting journal entries. Recently, driven by the advances in artificial intelligence, Deep Learning techniques have emerged in financial auditing to examine vast quantities of accounting data. However, learning highly adaptive audit models in decentralized and dynamic settings remains challenging. It requires the study of data distribution shifts over multiple clients and time periods. In this work, we propose a Federated Continual Learning framework enabling auditors to learn audit models from decentral clients continuously. We evaluate the framework's ability to detect accounting anomalies in common scenarios of organizational activity. Our empirical results, using real-world datasets and combined federated-continual learning strategies, demonstrate the learned model's ability to detect anomalies in audit settings of data distribution shifts.Type: conference paper
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PublicationFederated and Privacy-Preserving Learning of Accounting Data in Financial Statement Audits(Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 2022-11-01)
;Sattarov, TimurThe ongoing 'digital transformation' fundamentally changes audit evidence's nature, recording, and volume. Nowadays, the International Standards on Auditing (ISA) requires auditors to examine vast volumes of a financial statement's underlying digital accounting records. As a result, audit firms also `digitize' their analytical capabilities and invest in Deep Learning (DL), a successful sub-discipline of Machine Learning. The application of DL offers the ability to learn specialized audit models from data of multiple clients, e.g., organizations operating in the same industry or jurisdiction. In general, regulations require auditors to adhere to strict data confidentiality measures. At the same time, recent intriguing discoveries showed that large-scale DL models are vulnerable to leaking sensitive training data information. Today, it often remains unclear how audit firms can apply DL models while complying with data protection regulations. In this work, we propose a Federated Learning framework to train DL models on auditing relevant accounting data of multiple clients. The framework encompasses Differential Privacy and Split Learning capabilities to mitigate data confidentiality risks at model inference. Our results provide empirical evidence that auditors can benefit from DL models that accumulate knowledge from multiple sources of proprietary client data.Type: conference paper -
PublicationMulti-view Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning of Accounting Data Representations for Downstream Audit Tasks(Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 2021-11-03)
;Timur SattarovDamian BorthInternational audit standards require the direct assessment of a financial statement’s underlying accounting transactions, referred to as journal entries. Recently, driven by the advances in artificial intelligence, deep learning inspired audit techniques have emerged in the field of auditing vast quantities of journal entry data. Nowadays, the majority of such methods rely on a set of specialized models, each trained for a particular audit task. At the same time, when conducting a financial statement audit, audit teams are confronted with (i) challenging time-budget constraints, (ii) extensive documentation obligations, and (iii) strict model interpretability requirements. As a result, auditors prefer to harness only a single preferably ‘multi-purpose’ model throughout an audit engagement. We propose a contrastive self-supervised learning framework designed to learn audit task invariant accounting data representations to meet this requirement. The framework encompasses deliberate interacting data augmentation policies that utilize the attribute characteristics of journal entry data. We evaluate the framework on two real-world datasets of city payments and transfer the learned representations to three downstream audit tasks: anomaly detection, audit sampling, and audit documentation. Our experimental results provide empirical evidence that the proposed framework offers the ability to increase the efficiency of audits by learning rich and interpretable ‘multi-task’ representations.Type: conference paperScopus© Citations 3