Credit Card Fraud Detection via Intelligent Sampling and Self-supervised Learning

Abstract

The significant increase in credit card transactions can be attributed to the rapid growth of online shopping and digital payments, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. To safeguard cardholders, e-commerce companies, and financial institutions, the implementation of an effective and real-time fraud detection method using modern artificial intelligence techniques is imperative. However, the development of machine-learning-based approaches for fraud detection faces challenges such as inadequate transaction representation, noise labels, and data imbalance. Additionally, practical considerations like dynamic thresholds, concept drift, and verification latency need to be appropriately addressed. In this study, we designed a fraud detection method that accurately extracts a series of spatial and temporal representative features to precisely describe credit card transactions. Furthermore, several auxiliary self-supervised objectives were developed to model cardholders’ behavior sequences. By employing intelligent sampling strategies, potential noise labels were eliminated, thereby reducing the level of data imbalance. The developed method encompasses various innovative functions that cater to practical usage requirements. We applied this method to two real-world datasets, and the results indicated a higher F1 score compared to the most commonly used online fraud detection methods.