A Novel Ensemble Belief Rule-Based Model for Online Payment Fraud Detection

In recent years, with the rapid development of technology and the economy, online transaction fraud has become more and more frequent. In the face of massive records of online transaction data, manual detection methods are long outdated, and machine learning methods have become mainstream. However, although traditional machine learning methods perform well in fraud detection tasks, the lack of interpretability and class imbalance issues have always been pain points that are difficult to resolve for such methods. Unlike traditional methods, the belief rule base, as a rule-based expert system model, can integrate expert knowledge and has excellent interpretability. In this paper, we propose an innovative ensemble BRB (belief rule base) model to solve the credit card fraud detection problem by combining an ensemble learning framework with the BRB model. Compared with traditional machine learning methods, the proposed model has the advantage of high interpretability. And compared with traditional BRB models, the ensemble framework enables better performance in dealing with highly imbalanced classification tasks. In an experimental study, two datasets of credit card fraud detection from Kaggle are used to validate the effectiveness of this work. The results show that this new method can achieve excellent performance in the application of fraud detection and is capable of effectively mitigating the impact of an imbalanced dataset.