Machine learning approaches for credit card fraud detection

Abstract

With the extensive use of credit cards, fraud appears as a major issue in the credit card business. It is hard to have some figures on the impact of fraud, since companies and banks do not like to disclose the amount of losses due to frauds. At the same time, public data are scarcely available for confidentiality issues, leaving unanswered many questions about what is the best strategy. Another problem in credit-card fraud loss estimation is that we can measure the loss of only those frauds that have been detected, and it is not possible to assess the size of unreported/undetected frauds. Fraud patterns are changing rapidly where fraud detection needs to be re-evaluated from a reactive to a proactive approach. In recent years, machine learning has gained lot of popularity in image analysis, natural language processing and speech recognition. In this regard, implementation of efficient fraud detection algorithms using machine-learning techniques is key for reducing these losses, and to assist fraud investigators. In this paper logistic regression, based machine learning approach is utilized to detect credit card fraud. The results show logistic regression based approaches outperforms with the highest accuracy and it can be effec-tively used for fraud investigators.