Digital banking fortification: a real-time isolation forest architecture for detecting online transaction fraud

Abstract

Abstract Since the use of the Internet has increased exponentially, numerous organizations, including the financial industry, offer services online. As a result, financial scams are expanding in quantity and complexity worldwide, resulting in massive revenue losses and making digital fraudulent transactions a severe issue. Abnormal attempts and illegal access are instances of these dangers that fraudulent activity detection systems must identify. Machine learning and data mining approaches have been extensively used to address this issue in recent years. However, these approaches must be enhanced regarding real-time detection speed, tackling enormous amounts of data, and finding undiscovered attack patterns. Consequently, the present study provides a real-time architecture for averting and identifying digital transaction fraud, which relies on the Isolation Forest (IForest) approach and big data analytic tools, including Spark Streaming, sparkling water, Kafka, and PostgreSQL. This architecture seeks to improve present detection strategies by increasing accuracy for detection when considering enormous amounts of data. Two real datasets of online transactional fraud are used to assess the proposed architecture, and the findings are compared to relevant studies. The investigation results showed that IForest performed flawlessly, achieving an accuracy of 0.99 in two datasets.