Credit card fraud detection using machine learning techniques: A comparative analysis

Financial fraud is an ever growing menace with far consequences in the financial industry. Data mining had played an imperative role in the detection of credit card fraud in online transactions. Credit card fraud detection, which is a data mining problem, becomes challenging due to two major reasons - first, the profiles of normal and fraudulent behaviours change constantly and secondly, credit card fraud data sets are highly skewed. The performance of fraud detection in credit card transactions is greatly affected by the sampling approach on dataset, selection of variables and detection technique(s) used. This paper investigates the performance of naïve bayes, k-nearest neighbor and logistic regression on highly skewed credit card fraud data. Dataset of credit card transactions is sourced from European cardholders containing 284,807 transactions. A hybrid technique of under-sampling and oversampling is carried out on the skewed data. The three techniques are applied on the raw and preprocessed data. The work is implemented in Python. The performance of the techniques is evaluated based on accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, Matthews correlation coefficient and balanced classification rate. The results shows of optimal accuracy for naïve bayes, k-nearest neighbor and logistic regression classifiers are 97.92%, 97.69% and 54.86% respectively. The comparative results show that k-nearest neighbour performs better than naïve bayes and logistic regression techniques.