An adaptive approach on credit card fraud detection using transaction aggregation and word embeddings

Abstract

Due to the surge of interest in online retailing, the use of credit cards has been rapidly expanded in recent years. Stealing the card details to perform online transactions, which is called fraud, has also seen more frequently. Preventive solutions and instant fraud detection methods are widely studied due to critical financial losses in many industries. In this work, a Gradient Boosting Tree (GBT) model for the real-time detection of credit card frauds on the streaming Card-Not-Present (CNP) transactions is investigated with the use of different attributes of card transactions. Numerical, hand-crafted numerical, categorical and textual attributes are combined to form a feature vector to be used as a training instance. One of the contributions of this work is to employ transaction aggregation for the categorical values and inclusion of vectors from a character level word embedding model which is trained on the merchant names of the transactions. The other contribution is introducing a new strategy for training dataset generation employing the sliding window approach in a given time frame to adapt to the changes on the trends of fraudulent transactions. In the experiments, the feature engineering strategy and the automated training set generation methodology are evaluated on the real credit card transactions.