HQRNN-FD: A Hybrid Quantum Recurrent Neural Network for Fraud Detection

Abstract

Detecting financial fraud is a critical aspect of modern intelligent financial systems. Despite the advances brought by deep learning in predictive accuracy, challenges persist—particularly in capturing complex, high-dimensional nonlinear features. This study introduces a novel hybrid quantum recurrent neural network for fraud detection (HQRNN-FD). The model utilizes variational quantum circuits (VQCs) incorporating angle encoding, data reuploading, and hierarchical entanglement to project transaction features into quantum state spaces, thereby facilitating quantum-enhanced feature extraction. For sequential analysis, the model integrates a recurrent neural network (RNN) with a self-attention mechanism to effectively capture temporal dependencies and uncover latent fraudulent patterns. To mitigate class imbalance, the synthetic minority over-sampling technique (SMOTE) is employed during preprocessing, enhancing both class representation and model generalizability. Experimental evaluations reveal that HQRNN-FD attains an accuracy of 0.972 on publicly available fraud detection datasets, outperforming conventional models by 2.4%. In addition, the framework exhibits robustness against quantum noise and improved predictive performance with increasing qubit numbers, validating its efficacy and scalability for imbalanced financial classification tasks.