Credit Card Fraud Detection Using Meta-Learning: Issues and Initial Results

In this paper we describe initial experiments using meta-learning techniques to learn models of fraudulent credit card transactions. Our collaborators, some of the nation's largest banks, have provided us with real-world credit card transaction data from which models may be computed to distinguish fraudulent transactions from legitimate ones, a problem growing in importance. Our experiments reported here are the first step towards a better understanding of the advantages and limitations of current meta-learning strategies. We argue that, for the fraud detection domain, fraud catching rate (True Positive rate) and false alarm rate (False Positive rate) are better metrics than the overall accuracy when evaluating the learned fraud classifiers. We show that given a skewed distribution in the original data, artificially more balanced training data leads to better classifiers. We demonstrate how meta-learning can be used to combine different classifiers (from different learning algorithms) ..