An improved differential evolution algorithm for quantifying fraudulent transactions

Abstract

Identification of fraudulent credit card transactions is a complex problem mainly due to the following factors: 1) The relative behavior of customers and fraudsters may alter over time. 2) The ratio of legitimate to fraudulent transactions is highly imbalanced, and 3) Investigators examine a small segment of transactions in a reasonable time frame. Researchers have proposed various algorithms to identify potential fraud in a new incoming transaction. However, these approaches require significant human investigator effort and are sometimes misleading. To address this issue, this paper proposes an improved multiobjective differential evolution (DE) algorithm to estimate the distribution of fraudulent transactions in a set of new incoming transactions, referred to as quantifying fraudulent transactions. Our paper has three major novelties. First, we present the problem formulation of cost-based feature selection with maximum quantification ability. Second, we improve the DE by applying effective trial vector generation algorithms to the random control parameter settings to exploit the advantage of individual DE variants. Third, we develop the maximum-relevancy-minimum-redundancy-based Pareto refining operator to enhance the self-learning ability of individuals in Pareto solutions. We compare our approach against four other modifications of DE and five state-of-the-art evolutionary algorithms on real-time credit datasets in streaming and non-streaming frameworks using hyper-volume, two-set coverage, and spread performance metrics.