CREDIT CARD FRAUD DETECTION (Machine learning algorithms)

Sammanfattning: Credit card fraud is a field with perpetrators performing illegal actions that may affect other individuals or companies negatively. For instance, a criminalcan steal credit card information from an account holder and then conduct fraudulent transactions. The activities are a potential contributory factor to how illegal organizations such as terrorists and drug traffickers support themselves financially. Within the machine learning area, there are several methods that possess the ability to detect credit card fraud transactions; supervised learning and unsupervised learning algorithms. This essay investigates the supervised approach, where two algorithms (Hellinger Distance Decision Tree (HDDT) and Random Forest) are evaluated on a real life dataset of 284,807 transactions. Under those circumstances, the main purpose is to develop a “well-functioning” model with a reasonable capacity to categorize transactions as fraudulent or legit. As the data is heavily unbalanced, reducing the false-positive rate is also an important part when conducting research in the chosen area. In conclusion, evaluated algorithms present a fairly similar outcome, where both models have the capability to distinguish the classes from each other. However, the Random Forest approach has a better performance than HDDT in all measures of interest.