Supervised Machine Learning Algorithms for Credit Card Fraudulent Transaction Detection

Abstract

Cashless transactions such as online transactions, credit card transactions, and mobile wallet are becoming more popular in financial transactions nowadays. With increased number of such cashless transaction, number of fraudulent transactions is also increasing. Fraud can be distinguished by analyzing spending behavior of customers (users) from previous transaction data. Credit card fraud has highly imbalanced publicly available datasets. In this paper, we apply many supervised machine learning algorithms to detect credit card fraudulent transactions using a real-world dataset. Furthermore, we employ these algorithms to implement a super classifier using ensemble learning methods. We identify the most important variables that may lead to higher accuracy in credit card fraudulent transaction detection. Additionally, we compare and discuss the performance of various supervised machine learning algorithms that exist in literature against the super classifier that we implemented in this paper.