A Deep Learning Ensemble With Data Resampling for Credit Card Fraud Detection

Credit cards play an essential role in today’s digital economy, and their usage has recently grown tremendously, accompanied by a corresponding increase in credit card fraud. Machine learning (ML) algorithms have been utilized for credit card fraud detection. However, the dynamic shopping patterns of credit card holders and the class imbalance problem have made it difficult for ML classifiers to achieve optimal performance. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposes a robust deep-learning approach that consists of long short-term memory (LSTM) and gated recurrent unit (GRU) neural networks as base learners in a stacking ensemble framework, with a multilayer perceptron (MLP) as the meta-learner. Meanwhile, the hybrid synthetic minority oversampling technique and edited nearest neighbor (SMOTE-ENN) method is employed to balance the class distribution in the dataset. The experimental results showed that combining the proposed deep learning ensemble with the SMOTE-ENN method achieved a sensitivity and specificity of 1.000 and 0.997, respectively, which is superior to other widely used ML classifiers and methods in the literature.