Data-Driven Approach for Credit Card Fraud Detection with Autoencoder and One-Class Classification Techniques

With the development of e-commerce, payment by credit card has become an essential means for the purchases of goods and services online. Especially, the Manufacturing Sector faces a high risk of fraud online payment. Its high turnover is the reason making this sector is lucrative with fraud. This gave rise to fraudulent activity on the accounts of private users, banks, and other services. For this reason, in recent years, many studies have been carried out using machine learning techniques to detect and block fraudulent transactions. This article aims to present a new approach based on real-time data combining two methods for the detection of credit card fraud. We first use the variational autoencoder(VAE) to obtain representations of normal transactions, and then we train a support vector data description (SVDD) model with these representations. The advantage of the representation learned automatically by the variational autoencoder is that it makes the data smoother, which makes it possible to increase the detection performance of one-class classification methods. The performance evaluation of the proposed model is done on real data from European credit cardholders. Our experiments show that our approach has obtained good results with a very high fraud detection rate.