systems

Article
Credit Card Fraud Detection Based on Unsupervised
Attentional Anomaly Detection Network
Shanshan Jiang 1 , Ruiting Dong 1 , Jie Wang 1 and Min Xia 2, *

1 School of Management Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology,
Nanjing 210044, China; [email protected] (S.J.); [email protected] (R.D.);
[email protected] (J.W.)
2 Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Big Data Analysis Technology, Nanjing University of Information Science and
Technology, Nanjing 210044, China
* Correspondence: [email protected]

Abstract: In recent years, with the rapid development of Internet technology, the number of credit
card users has increased significantly. Subsequently, credit card fraud has caused a large amount of
economic losses to individual users and related financial enterprises. At present, traditional machine
learning methods (such as SVM, random forest, Markov model, etc.) have been widely studied in credit
card fraud detection, but these methods are often have difficulty in demonstrating their effectiveness
when faced with unknown attack patterns. In this paper, a new Unsupervised Attentional Anomaly
Detection Network-based Credit Card Fraud Detection framework (UAAD-FDNet) is proposed. Among
them, fraudulent transactions are regarded as abnormal samples, and autoencoders with Feature
Attention and GANs are used to effectively separate them from massive transaction data. Extensive
experimental results on Kaggle Credit Card Fraud Detection Dataset and IEEE-CIS Fraud Detection
Dataset demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing fraud detection methods.

Keywords: fraud detection; anomaly detection; unsupervised learning; autoencoders; GANs

Citation: Jiang, S.; Wang, J.; Dong, R.;

1. Introduction
Xia, M. Credit Card Fraud Detection In recent years, the development of technologies such as big data and artificial in-
Based on Unsupervised Attentional telligence has fully upgraded payment methods. The popularity of credit card mobile
Anomaly Detection Network. Systems payment has given fraudsters greater opportunities for credit card fraud, through methods
2023, 11, 305. https://doi.org/ such as credit card cashing, counterfeit card fraud, payment fraud, etc. [1,2]. At present,
10.3390/systems11060305 the means of fraud are characterized by high technology, concealment, and cross-regional
Academic Editors: Wendong Yang,
crimes. The implementation process of the case is more concealed, the techniques are con-
Jinpei Liu and Jianzhou Wang stantly being renewed, and the risk of fraud is gradually moving forward to the business
application process [3]. This has produced a large number of non-performing assets and
Received: 7 May 2023 had a certain degree of impact on the stability of the economic market [4]. Therefore, the
Revised: 2 June 2023 prevention and detection of credit card fraud has always been a research area that has
Accepted: 12 June 2023
attracted significant attention.
Published: 13 June 2023
With the advent of the information age, a large number of researchers and scholars
have conducted research on credit card fraud detection, including improving detection
efficiency by overcoming the unbalanced characteristics of credit card transactions and
Copyright: © 2023 by the authors.
treating fraudulent transactions as abnormal outliers. In recent years, the application of ma-
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. chine learning [5–8] to credit card fraud detection has overcome many of the shortcomings
This article is an open access article of traditional fraud detection methods and formed a related research field. Many scholars
distributed under the terms and at home and abroad have conducted a lot of research and analysis on credit card fraud data
conditions of the Creative Commons and cases by using machine learning and data mining methods [9–11]. However, due to the
Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// high imbalance of credit card fraud transaction data (that is, the number of fraud samples
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ is much smaller than the number of transaction samples), how effective algorithms can be
4.0/). used to further improve the accuracy of credit card fraud detection is still an urgent problem

Systems 2023, 11, 305. https://doi.org/10.3390/systems11060305 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/systems

Systems 2023, 11, 305 2 of 14

to be solved. This work aims to survey existing credit card fraud detection methods and
propose a new credit card fraud detection network based on the unsupervised attentional
anomaly detection paradigm. The network follows the training paradigm of Generative Ad-
versarial Network (GAN) [12] and mainly consists of a generator and a discriminator. The
generator generates samples as close as possible to the real data through self-supervised
learning [13–15], and effectively encodes the high-level feature representation (hidden
vector) of the normal transaction data distribution, and the discriminator detects the forged
ones of the generator as much as possible. We used data samples to form an adversarial
training mode. In the generator, we propose a channel-wise feature attention, which enables
the network to better reconstruct more realistic pseudo-samples during the training phase,
which helps to learn the hidden layer feature representation of normal transactions. In
order to effectively supervise the training process of the model, this paper also proposes
a hybrid weighted loss function. In the test phase, the hidden vector and the distance
between the reconstructed sample and the input sample in the feature space are calculated
to determine whether the current transaction sample is fraudulent. In the experimental
part, we compared the proposed method with the existing machine learning methods and
deep learning methods on Kaggle Credit Card Fraud Detection Dataset and IEEE-CIS Fraud
Detection Dataset to prove its advancement.
The main contributions of this paper lie in the following aspects:
• Reframe the problem of credit card fraud detection as anomaly detection of fraudulent
transactions, and propose a new credit card Fraud Detection framework based on
Unsupervised Attentional Anomaly Detection Network (UAAD-FDNet).
• A channel-wise feature attention is proposed. This module enables the network to
effectively capture the interdependence between feature channels to better learn how
to reconstruct normal transaction samples.
• A hybrid weighted loss function is proposed to enable the model to learn an effec-
tive encoding method for hidden vectors and reconstruct samples as realistically as
possible. In the test phase, fraudulent transactions are identified by calculating the
hidden vectors and the characteristic distance between the reconstructed samples and
the input samples.
• Experimental results on Kaggle Credit Card Fraud Detection Dataset and IEEE-CIS
Fraud Detection Dataset show that our method outperforms existing machine learning-
based and deep learning-based fraud detection methods.

2. Background and Related Work

As a product integrating financial business and Internet technology, credit card has
attracted much attention since its appearance. With the increasingly prominent problem
of credit card fraud, a large number of scholars have carried out in-depth research on this
problem in recent years.
Before the rise of deep learning methods, traditional machine learning methods (such
as Support Vector Machine (SVM), random forest, Markov model, etc.) were often used
to solve the problem of credit card fraud detection. In 2006, Chen et al. [16] proposed an
effective fraud detection system based on SVM and genetic algorithm for the unevenly
distributed few-sample data. In 2012, Khan et al. [17] used Hidden Markov Model (HMM)
to make fraudulent transactions easier to detect by reducing the complexity of the algorithm.
In 2015, Zareapoor et al. [18] proposed a new bagging ensemble classifier based on the
decision tree algorithm. On a real credit card transaction dataset, this method can achieve
real-time reasoning and effectively solve the problem of category imbalance of credit card
transaction data. In 2018, Yee et al. [19] studied the performance of a variety of Bayesian
classifiers on credit card fraud detection tasks. All classifiers can achieve good detection
accuracy on the dataset processed by Principal Components Analysis (PCA). Although
the above machine learning methods can solve the problem of financial fraud to a certain
extent, given the complexity of credit card transaction behavior in the real world, how to
Systems 2023, 11, 305 3 of 14

quickly and accurately extract typical features from limited transaction data is a topic that
still needs further exploration.
In recent years, deep learning technology has demonstrated strong capabilities in
many fields [20–26], the development of deep learning has significantly promoted the
reform of the financial industry, and, at the same time, brought new ideas to the research
of financial fraud detection. In 2016, Fu et al. [27] proposed a CNN-based fraud detection
network, which learns the intrinsic patterns of fraudulent behavior from labeled data to
identify whether there is fraudulent behavior in each transaction sample. In 2018, Chouiekh
and Haj [28] explored the performance of Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN)
and some traditional machine learning methods on fraud events. The experimental results
on mobile communication networks showed that DCNN is significantly better than other
methods. However, due to the serious data imbalance in the financial fraud data in the
real world, this brings severe challenges to the above methods. Saia et al. [29] proposed
analyzing this issue and the heterogeneity of credit card data in the frequency domain to
obtain a more stable information representation for fraud detection. In 2019, Fiore et al. [30]
aimed at the class imbalance problem of financial fraud transaction data, and used GAN
to generate minority class samples to train more effective classifiers. Saia and Carta [31]
conducted research on proactive fraud detection based on Fourier transform and Wavelet
transform. In 2022, Esenogho et al. [32] used hybrid data resampling technology and
integrated learning to conduct robust credit card fraud detection based on LSTM [33] and
AdaBoost [34]. In this paper, we reformulate the task of credit card fraud detection as an
anomaly detection task, training autoencoder, and GAN in a clever way to avoid adverse
effects of data imbalance on the model.

3. Methodology
In this paper, the credit card fraud detection problem is treated as an anomaly detection
problem. Fraudulent transaction data are used as an abnormal sample in the transaction
system. We use an unsupervised attentional anomaly detection network (including au-
toencoder with Feature Attention and GAN) to separate it from normal transaction data to
complete the purpose of fraud detection. In the following, we will introduce the proposed
credit card fraud detection algorithm in detail.

3.1. Proposed Model

The credit card Fraud Detection Network based on Unsupervised Attentional Anomaly
Detection (UAAD-FDNet) proposed in this paper is mainly composed of a generator G and
a discriminator D, as shown in Figure 1.
G consists of an autoencoder (including a pair of encoder GE and decoder GD ) and an
encoder E. The autoencoder first uses GE to encode the input feature x̂ ∈ RC into a hidden
vector z ∈ Rd , and then maps it back to the original feature space through GD to obtain
the reconstructed feature x̂ ∈ RC . During the training process, the abstract representation
(advanced representation) of high-dimensional features can be effectively learned through
the specific loss function self-encoding. E is used to re-encode the reconstructed feature,
and map it to the hidden vector space to obtain ẑ ∈ Rc . z and ẑ have the same vector
dimension, which enables us to supervise the training process of the network by computing
feature distances between them. In terms of network structure, GE and E have similar
parameter structures and have a symmetrical relationship with GD . Specifically, GE mainly
includes a fully connected layer (FC) and a LeakyReLU activation layer. FC is used to
linearly map low-dimensional features to high-dimensional hidden space, and LeakyReLU
is used to perform non-linear transformation on features to enhance the feature expression
ability of the model. The same goes for E. GD is the reverse process of GE . They have a
symmetrical network structure. The only difference is that the output layer features of GD
need to be activated by Tanh to normalize their feature values to [−1,1] (x̂ and x are in
the same vector space). D contains only one encoder, which is used to extract the abstract
features of x and x̂, respectively, and judge whether the input feature is true or not through
Systems 2023, 11, 305 4 of 14

the Softmax classification layer. The above basically form our credit card fraud detection
framework. Considering that the fully connected layer is prone to overfitting, the dropout
layer should be selectively added to our network according to the feature dimension of the
input data.
In addition, in order to make G better learn the reconstruction method of x̂, this
paper also proposes a channel-wise feature attention, and its structure diagram is shown
in Figure 2. For a set of transaction sample features u ∈ RC , we first group its feature
channels to obtain two sets of sub-features u g ∈ R N ×d and ul ∈ Rd× N (N represents the
number of groups, and d represents the feature dimension of each group). Then, feature
computation with self-attention [35,36] is performed on two sets of sub-features separately
to fully capture the global and local correlations among feature channels. Self-attention
is widely used in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), which can effectively
capture the dependencies between arbitrary features by computing the spatial distance of
pairs of features. Specifically, it first performs linear transformation on the input feature
q ∈ Rk×n to obtain Query (Q ∈ Rk×n ), Key (K ∈ Rk×n ), and Value (V ∈ Rk×n ). Then, the
correlation between Q and K is calculated to obtain S ∈ Rk×k , each row of which passes
through Softmax to represent the degree of correlation between paired features. Finally,
S and V are fused to complete the output representation P ∈ Rk×n . The mathematical
expression of the above process is as follows

p = So f tmax ( Q ◦ K T ) ◦ V, (1)
where ◦ means matrix multiplication. In this paper, k and n are denoted as N, d, d, and N
in the two branches, respectively. Finally, element-wise fusion is performed on the output
features of the two branches to obtain the output of the feature attention module. We
introduce this module in the skip connection of the generator. On the one hand, it can
preserve the fine-grained features of the original sample, and on the other hand, it can
effectively filter the redundant features in the transaction sample.

28
… GE GD … E Lcon
z z
x x Llat

Real
D Ladv
Fake

FC Feature
LeakyReLU Tanh Softmax
Attention

Figure 1. Schematic diagram of the framework structure of credit card fraud detection based on
unsupervised attentional anomaly detection.

N Feature
…

Attention
d
C d
…
Feature C
N Attention

Q
k
k K k
k
n n
V

Figure 2. Schematic diagram of the internal structure of channel-wise feature attention.

Systems 2023, 11, 305 5 of 14

3.2. Model Training

In this paper, the credit card fraud detection problem is reformulated as an anomaly
detection problem since, in real transaction systems, compared with normal transactions,
fraudulent transaction records often contain abnormal data values, so this definition is
a relatively straightforward way. Utilising credit card transaction data, our goal is to
use the proposed anomaly detection framework to perform unsupervised adversarial
learning on one of the categories of data (e.g., normal transaction data), and make the
model parameters highly fit this category. In the testing phase, when the model encounters
transaction data that have not been seen in the training phase (e.g., fraudulent transaction
data), the generator G’s before and after hidden vector representations z and ẑ tend to
produce large feature differences. By setting a threshold α, the difference value will be
transformed into a class value, 0 (normal transaction data) or 1 (fraud transaction data).
We follow a hypothesis that a model with high bias towards normal transaction samples is
difficult to generate fraudulent transaction samples. As we only use normal transaction
data during the training phase, our model parameters only fit normal transaction data and
are not suitable for fraudulent transaction data, resulting in the aforementioned differences.
Specifically, in the data preprocessing stage, the credit card fraud detection dataset
T is first split into a training set Tr and a test set Te . Among them, Tr = { x1 , x2 , · · · , xm }
contains m normal transaction data samples, Te = { x˜1 , x˜2 , · · · , x˜n } contains n normal
transaction data samples and fraudulent transaction data samples, and its label yi ∈
{0, 1}, i = 1, 2, · · · , n. In the experiments of this paper, the amount of fraudulent transaction
data in Kaggle Credit Card Fraud Detection Dataset and IEEE-CIS Fraud Detection Dataset
only accounts for a very small part of the entire dataset, which means that the problem of
fraud detection also needs to consider the imbalance of data samples.
In the training phase, the model only performs parameter learning on Tr to train a set
of model parameters that are highly biased to the distribution of normal transaction data. In
order to make the proposed model better learn the biased network parameters, we propose
a hybrid weighted loss function L adv + λ2 Lcon + λ3 Llat (λ1 , λ2 , λ3 denote hyperparameters).
• Adversarial Loss L adv : In our framework, the goal of the adversarial loss is to make
the samples generated by G as close as possible to the distribution of real normal
transaction data samples, so that D cannot accurately distinguish generated samples
from real samples. In other words, the adversarial loss is an objective function for
adversarial training by maximizing the misjudgment rate of D for generated samples
while minimizing the misjudgment rate of G. Its mathematical expression is as follows:

L adv = Ex∼ px [logD ( x )] + Ex∼ px [log(1 − D ( x̂ ))]. (2)

• Context Loss Lcon : In order to make the samples generated by G closer to the original
data distribution in terms of eigenvalues to produce more realistic samples, the context
loss is introduced into the training phase of the model. It minimizes the L1 distance
between the generated samples and the original normal transaction data samples in
the feature space, so that G can preserve the semantic and structural information of
the input features as much as possible when generating samples. Its mathematical
definition is as follows:

Lcon = Ex∼ px k x − x̂ k1 . (3)

• Latent Loss Llat : In addition to the above two loss functions, this paper also introduces
a Latent Loss. This function ensures that G can produce similar latent space represen-
tations by minimizing the L2 distance of two latent vectors of G in the feature space.
In other words, Latent Loss enables G to learn effective encoding methods for normal
transaction data from generated samples. In the testing stage, when encountering
never-before-seen fraudulent transaction samples, the encoding method of G may fail,
resulting in a large feature difference between z and ẑ. For such sample data, we can
Systems 2023, 11, 305 6 of 14

classify it as an abnormal sample (fraudulent transaction sample). The mathematical

expression of Latent Loss is as follows:

Llat = Ex∼ px kz − ẑk2 . (4)

4. Experiments
4.1. Dataset
4.1.1. Credit Card Fraud Detection Dataset
In this section, the credit card fraud detection dataset on Kaggle is used to verify
the effectiveness of the proposed UAAD-FDNet. The dataset collects 284,807 credit card
transaction records, which are generated by European cardholders within two days in
September 2013. Considering data privacy issues, this dataset only provides transaction
data processed by PCA. Each transaction record contains a total of 28 principal component
values of V1–V28 and the other two unpreprocessed ‘Time’ and ‘Amount’ feature. ‘Time’
represents the time difference between each transaction and the first transaction in the
dataset. ‘Amount’ indicates the amount of each transaction. The schematic diagram of the
data sample is shown in Figure 3. In addition, each transaction also contains a set of ‘Class’
tags: 0 for normal transaction data, 1 for fraudulent transaction data. Among them, there
are only 492 fraudulent transactions, which only account for 0.172% of the entire dataset.
Figure 4 shows the significant difference in the number of positive and negative samples in
this dataset. Therefore, the category imbalance problem should be considered first. The
statistical information of the dataset is shown in Table 1.

Time V1 V2 V3 V4 V5 V26 V27 V28 Amount

0 -1.35981 -0.07278 2.536347 1.378155 -0.33832 -0.18911 0.133558 -0.02105 149.62

0 1.191857 0.266151 0.16648 0.448154 0.060018 0.125895 -0.00898 0.014724 2.69

…
1 -1.35835 -1.34016 1.773209 0.37978 -0.5032 -0.1391 -0.05535 -0.05975 378.66

1 -0.96627 -0.18523 1.792993 -0.86329 -0.01031 -0.22193 0.062723 0.061458 123.5

2 -1.15823 0.877737 1.548718 0.403034 -0.40719 0.502292 0.219422 0.215153 69.99

…

160832 0.008812 0.94412 -0.38981 -0.59405 0.738905 0.094063 0.152648 -0.08589 9.51

160832 -2.45901 2.117867 -1.205 -0.62517 -1.48174 0.513479 -0.46243 -0.01536 9.25
…
160833 -2.11399 1.748864 -1.95475 0.768964 -0.08916 -0.31459 0.770459 0.100563 248.52

160833 -5.26402 5.795819 -5.58939 -0.25467 -0.18698 -0.26523 -0.14674 0.758428 5.9

Unpreprocessed Processed by PCA

Figure 3. The schematic diagram of the data sample.

105
Number

104

103
0

Class
Figure 4. Statistical chart of the number of positive and negative samples in the dataset.
Systems 2023, 11, 305 7 of 14

Table 1. Statistical information of credit card fraud detection dataset.

Item Value
Total Number of Transactions 284,807
Number of Fraudulent Transactions 492
Percentage of Fraudulent Transactions 0.172%
Number of Transaction Data Columns 31
PCA Principal Components Feature Quantity 28
Number of Labels 1

Since the data in the ‘Time’ and ‘Amount’ columns have not been preprocessed
before model training, we first perform data standardization on them. The mathematical
expression of this step is as follows:
0 xi − µ
xi = (5)
σ
0
Among them, xi represents the original eigenvalue, xi represents the standardized
eigenvalue, µ represents the mean, and σ represents the standard deviation. Through
this step, except for the ‘Class’ column, each transaction record in this dataset contains
30 standardized feature values. Next, we split the dataset into training and testing sets. In
view of the serious class imbalance problem in this dataset, the construction of training set
and test set needs to be treated carefully. In this paper, the proposed UAAD-FDNet only
relies on normal transaction samples for training during the training phase, which is highly
consistent with the category imbalance characteristics of the Kaggle credit card fraud
detection dataset. In other words, thanks to the unique training method, our method
cleverly avoids the disadvantage of data imbalance. In this experiment, we divided
284,315 normal transaction samples into a ratio of 8:2, of which 227,452 normal transaction
samples were used as the training set, and the remaining 56,863 normal samples and
492 fraudulent transaction samples constituted the test set. The statistical information of
the training set and test set is shown in Table 2.

Table 2. Statistical information of training set and test set.

Split Training Test Total

Class Normal Fraud Normal Fraud Both
Number 227,452 0 56,863 492 284,807

4.1.2. IEEE-CIS Fraud Detection Dataset

In addition, the IEEE-CIS fraud detection dataset is used as a generalization dataset to
fully validate the robustness of the algorithm proposed in this paper. The IEEE-CIS fraud
detection dataset consists of four files, train transaction, train identity, test transaction,
and test identity, which contain 394, 41, 393, and 41 columns of features, respectively.
Transaction and identity are joined by TransactionID. According to Najadat et al. [37]’s
settings, we first concatenate transaction and identity based on TransactionID to obtain
590,540 transaction samples with feature dimension of 433, and then remove unimportant
transaction date. Given that 378 features contain a large number of null values, which
may have a negative impact on the learning of the model during the training stage, these
features are also removed from the experiment in this paper. Similar to the Credit Card
Fraud Detection Dataset, this dataset also has a huge difference in terms of the size of
positive and negative samples, with fraud samples accounting for about 3.5% of the training
set. Therefore, it is necessary to develop an advanced algorithm that can effectively solve
the problem of data imbalance for credit card fraud detection. Different from existing
supervised learning-based methods, this paper utilizes an ingenious way to avoid the
negative impact of data imbalance based on the anomaly detection framework.
Systems 2023, 11, 305 8 of 14

4.2. Experimental Setup

All experiments in this article are implemented based on the Pytorch framework,
and the model is trained and tested on a GeForce RTX 2080Ti GPU. Adam is used as
an optimizer for training to perform gradient updates of model parameters. The initial
learning rate is set to 0.001 on Kaggle credit card fraud detection dataset, while 0.01 on
IEEE-CIS Fraud Detection Dataset. The batch size is set to 256. The model is trained on two
datasets until convergence, with a maximum number of epochs of 100.
In our proposed model, for GE , the parameters of its five FC layers are denoted as
W1 ∈ R(30×64) , W2 ∈ R(64×128) , W3 ∈ R(128×256) , W4 ∈ R(256×512) and W5 ∈ R(512×1024) ,
respectively. E and D have similar network structure parameters, while GD is the opposite.
Therefore, the hidden vector z, ẑ ∈ R1024 .
In addition, in order to effectively evaluate the effectiveness of the fraud detection
framework proposed in this paper, we adopt Precision (PR), Recall (RC), F1-score (F1),
and Area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) as the model evaluation
indicators for this experiment. The mathematical formulas are as follows

TP
PR = , (6)
TP + FP
TP
RC = , (7)
TP + FN

2 × PR × RC
F1 = , (8)
PR + RC

Sensitivity = RC, (9)

TN
Speci f icity = , (10)
TN + FP
where TP represents True Positive. FP represents False Positive. TN represents True
Negative. Furthermore, FN represents False Negative. AUC is the area under the curve
composed of 1-Specificity and Sensitivity in the horizontal and vertical coordinates. From
Equations (9) and (10), it can be observed that a larger AUC indicates better performance
of the model.

4.3. Threshold α Setting

In this paper, the credit card fraud detection problem is reformulated as an anomaly
detection problem. In the testing phase, we discriminate abnormal samples (fraudulent
transactions) by calculating the characteristic distance between x and x̂ and z and ẑ. The
following principles are followed:

Score = β 1 dcon + β 2 dlat (11)

Among them, dcon represents the L1 distance between x and x̂, dlat represents the L2
distance between z and ẑ, β 1 and β 2 are two hyperparameters, and Score represents the
fraud score. In order to restrict this formula, we let β 1 + β 2 = 1. So Formula (5) can be
expressed as follows:

Score = βdcon + (1 − β)dlat (12)

We only need to adjust the parameter β to set a fraud score that conforms to the two
dataset in this paper. In the experiment, β is set to 0.5. When Score ≥ α, the transaction
sample is judged as a fraudulent transaction; when Score < α, it is regarded as a normal
transaction. To determine the threshold α, we visualize the kernel density curve of the
fraud score of Kaggle Credit Card Fraud Detection Dataset, as shown in Figure 5. The red
curve in the figure represents normal transactions, and the blue curve represents fraudulent
Systems 2023, 11, 305 9 of 14

transactions. The choice of threshold α should be at the intersection of the two curves, so in
this experiment, α is set to 0.4. The same applies to the IEEE-CIS Fraud Detection Dataset.

Figure 5. Kernel density curve of fraud score on Kaggle Credit Card Fraud Detection Dataset.

4.4. Model Comparison Experiment

4.4.1. Comparative Experiment on Kaggle Credit Card Fraud Detection Dataset
In this experiment, we compare our proposed UAAD-FDNet with existing traditional
machine learning methods and deep learning methods on Kaggle Credit Card Fraud
Detection Dataset to demonstrate its effectiveness. The experimental results are shown in
Table 3.
Support Vector Machine (SVM) [38], Decision Tree (DT) [39], Extreme Gradient Boosting
(XG Boost) [40], K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) [41], and Random Forest (RF) [42] are several
typical machine learning algorithms. Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) [33], Convolutional
Neural Network (CNN) [43], MultiLayer Perceptron (MLP) [44], and AutoEncoder (AE) [45]
are four commonly used deep learning methods. From the table, we can find that the
performance of machine learning methods on fraud detection tasks is far worse than that of
deep learning methods. This may be due to the fact that artificial feature engineering often
has difficult in fully modeling the internal relationship between different feature attributes
of financial transaction data, meaning that it is difficult for machine learning methods to
accurately determine the decision boundary. The deep learning method avoids the process of
manually constructing feature engineering, and it can effectively use parameter learning to
automatically capture the interdependence between high-dimensional features. Compared
with machine learning methods, it has stronger feature learning capabilities and general
ability. Among the four deep learning methods, the classification index of LSTM is relatively
low. Compared with LSTM, AE has improved by 0.0455/0.0104/0.0244/0.0434 in four
indicators. It uses the data x itself as a supervisory signal to guide the training of the neural
network, and can learn more compact data representation. From the data, we can see that
the fraud detection performance of AE is significantly better than that of LSTM, CNN, and
MLP. The UAAD-FDNet proposed in this paper takes advantage of the powerful feature
learning ability of AE and the data generation advantages of GAN to fully learn the normal
transaction data distribution in an unsupervised learning manner. In the test phase, the
detection of fraudulent transactions (abnormal samples) is completed by calculating the
hidden vectors z and ẑ and the feature distance between the input x and the reconstructed
sample x̂. Compared with other methods, the method proposed in this paper represents
a new training-inference paradigm. In this experiment, we compare UAAD-FDNet with
and without feature attention module. The experimental results in the table show that the
proposed method has more robust fraud detection performance. Without the help of FA,
Systems 2023, 11, 305 10 of 14

our method outperforms AE by 0.0228/0.0019/0.0099/0.0158 on four evaluation metrics,

respectively. After introducing FA, the overall performance of the model is significantly
better than other existing fraud detection methods. This fully demonstrates the advancement
and effectiveness of the UAAD-FDNet proposed in this paper.

Table 3. Comparative experimental results on Kaggle Credit Card Fraud Detection Dataset. (Red
bold indicates optimal results. Blue bold indicates suboptimal results).

Method Model PR RC F1 AUC

SVM 0.8854 0.7215 0.7951 0.8586
DT 0.8837 0.7269 0.7977 0.8598
Machine Learning XG Boost 0.8955 0.7280 0.8031 0.8649
KNN 0.9032 0.7268 0.8055 0.8709
RF 0.9112 0.7343 0.8132 0.8827
LSTM 0.9073 0.7391 0.8146 0.8845
CNN 0.9217 0.7453 0.8242 0.9075
Deep Learning MLP 0.9262 0.7461 0.8265 0.9094
AE 0.9528 0.7495 0.8390 0.9279
UAAD-FDNet w/o FA (Ours) 0.9756 0.7514 0.8489 0.9437
UAAD-FDNet w/ FA (Ours) 0.9795 0.7553 0.8529 0.9515

4.4.2. Comparative Experiment on IEEE-CIS Fraud Detection Dataset

Given that it is difficult to convincingly demonstrate the advantages of the proposed
method on a single dataset, we conduct another set of experiments on IEEE-CIS Fraud
Detection Dataset.
Table 4 shows the specific results of our experiment. As we analyze above, traditional
machine learning methods are generally inferior to deep learning methods. However, the
XG Boost achieves the best experimental results and even outperforms some deep learning
methods in some indicators. This indicates that in certain specific applications, machine
learning methods are still a powerful tool. Compared to these methods, our method can
effectively improve performance without using feature attention. This implies that the
fraud detection method based on the anomaly detection framework proposed in this paper
can fully utilize the normal transaction data for highly biased learning, enabling abnormal
samples (fraud samples) to be effectively distinguished. The feature attention module can
optimize the feature expression of the model, thereby suppressing adverse effects caused
by missing or incorrect data.

Table 4. Comparative experimental results on IEEE-CIS Fraud Detection Dataset. (Red bold indicates
optimal results. Blue bold indicates suboptimal results).

Method Model PR RC F1 AUC

SVM 0.9091 0.1906 0.3151 0.5783
DT 0.5206 0.5470 0.5335 0.7622
Machine Learning XG Boost 0.9447 0.5915 0.7275 0.7892
KNN 0.8358 0.3711 0.5140 0.6730
RF 0.9713 0.5024 0.6623 0.7405
LSTM 0.8525 0.5854 0.6941 0.7802
CNN 0.8779 0.5952 0.7094 0.7837
Deep Learning MLP 0.9159 0.5796 0.7099 0.8241
AE 0.9055 0.5873 0.7125 0.8181
UAAD-FDNet w/o FA (Ours) 0.9415 0.6027 0.7349 0.8390
UAAD-FDNet w/ FA (Ours) 0.9337 0.6281 0.7510 0.8556
Systems 2023, 11, 305 11 of 14

4.5. Model Ablation Experiment

In this section, we explore the impact of channel width and loss function on several
classification indicators on Kaggle Credit Card Fraud Detection Dataset. The specific
content of the experiment is as follows.

4.5.1. Ablation for Channel

In this section, we explore the effect of the model’s channel width on the final fraud
detection metrics. We assign a weight factor γ to each layer parameter of the network to
adjust the channel ratio of the entire model. In this experiment, γ is set to 0.25, 0.5, 1, and 2,
respectively, and four UAAD-FDNets with different widths are constructed accordingly.
Figure 6 shows the test results of UAAD-FDNet with FA and without FA on the Kaggle
credit card fraud detection dataset, where the F1 indicator is reported in (a), and the
AUC indicator is reported in (b). It can be seen from the figure that as γ continues to
increase, the fraud detection performance of the model is also continuously improving,
because the increase in the number of model parameters enables it to fit more complex
data distributions. When γ increases to a certain extent, the performance of the model
decreases, which may be because the increase in the number of parameters brings the risk
of overfitting to the model, which degrades its performance on the test set. Therefore, when
γ increases, strategies such as dropout and regularization to suppress overfitting should be
considered. In this experiment, γ = 1 is the best choice.

(a) F1 is reported

(b) AUC is reported

Figure 6. Ablation experiment results of UAAD-FDNet with different γ factors on Kaggle Credit Card
Fraud Detection Dataset. (a) shows the comparison of F1 indicators, and (b) shows the comparison of
AUC indicators.
Systems 2023, 11, 305 12 of 14

4.5.2. Ablation for Loss Function

In order to verify the effectiveness of the joint loss composed of three loss functions
proposed in this paper, we conduct sufficient ablation experiments. In order to ensure
the training paradigm of the GAN, the adversarial loss L adv is always preserved during
the experimental process, as this is crucial for the normal training of the entire network.
Context loss Lcon and latent loss Llat are removed from the training process, respectively, to
verify their important contributions to the UAAD-FDNet proposed in this paper. Table 5
shows the experimental results on the Kaggle credit card fraud detection dataset. From
the table, we can intuitively see that by removing Lcon and Llat , respectively, the overall
network experienced significant performance degradation on all four evaluation indicators.
This indicates that during the training stage, both are crucial for the network to learn
the distribution of normal transaction samples. If the two loss functions are removed at
the same time, the network’s performance to fraud detection is even worse than that of
traditional machine learning methods. This is because there is a lack of constraints on the
reconstructed sample x̂ and hidden vector z,ẑ in the generator G during the training stage,
which results in untrustworthy fraud scores when calculating according to Equation (12),
seriously hindering the network from identifying fraudulent transactions. If three different
loss functions are used to supervise the network at the same time, the method proposed in
this paper can achieve significant improvement with regard to four indicators, which fully
proves the effectiveness and criticality of the proposed joint loss function for this task.

Table 5. The ablation experiment results of the loss function on the Kaggle Credit Card Fraud
Detection Dataset. (Red bold indicates the optimal result.)

L adv Lcon Llat PR RC F1 AUC

X 0.7532 0.6451 0.6950 0.7443
X X 0.9088 0.7306 0.8100 0.8769
X X 0.9152 0.7375 0.8168 0.8964
X X X 0.9795 0.7553 0.8529 0.9515

5. Conclusions
In this paper, we reformulate the credit card fraud detection problem as an anomaly
detection problem, and propose a new unsupervised attentional anomaly detection-based
credit card fraud detection network (UAAD-FDNet). The network mainly consists of a
generator and a discriminator. Among them, the generator uses the autoencoder with
Feature Attention to reconstruct the input transaction samples to generate as real transaction
data as possible, in this way, it can learn the high-level representation (hidden vector)
of normal transaction data. The discriminator is used to form an adversarial training
mode with the generator during the training phase to better guide the generator to fit
the normal transaction data distribution. Compared with traditional machine learning
methods, such as SVM, DT, XG Boost, KNN, and RF, as well as existing deep learning-based
methods, such as LSTM, CNN, MLP, and AE, our method has stronger generalization. The
experimental results on Kaggle Credit Card Fraud Detection Dataset and IEEE-CIS Fraud
Detection Dataset show that the proposed method can effectively avoid the problem of
data imbalance, and its fraud detection performance is better. This indicates that, in real
scenarios, our method can safeguard the interests of financial users well.

Author Contributions: Conceptualization, S.J. and J.W.; methodology, S.J.; software, S.J.; validation,
J.W., M.X., and R.D.; formal analysis, R.D.; investigation, J.W. and R.D.; resources, S.J.; data curation,
J.W.; writing—original draft preparation, S.J.; writing—review and editing, J.W.; visualization, J.W.;
supervision, M.X.; project administration, S.J.; funding acquisition, S.J. All authors have read and
agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Funding: This work is supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of PR China
(72101121) and Ministry of Education, Humanities and social science projects (21YJC790054).
Systems 2023, 11, 305 13 of 14

Data Availability Statement: The data presented in this study are available on request from the
corresponding author.
Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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