Improving Credit Card Fraud Detection with Ensemble Deep Learning-Based Models: A Hybrid Approach Using SMOTE-ENN

Abstract

Advances in information and internet technologies have significantly transformed the business environment, including the financial sector. The COVID-19 pandemic has further accelerated this digital adoption, expanding the e-commerce industry and highlighting the necessity for secure online transactions. Credit Card Fraud Detection (CCFD) stands critical as the prevalence of fraudulent activities continues to rise with the increasing volume of online transactions. Traditional methods for detecting fraud, such as rule-based systems and basic machine learning models, tend to fail to keep pace with fraudsters' evolving tactics. This study proposes a novel ensemble deep learning-based approach that combines Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Gated Recurrent Units (GRU), and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) with the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique and Edited Nearest Neighbors (SMOTE-ENN) to address class imbalance and improve detection accuracy. The methodology integrates CNN for feature extraction, GRU for sequential transaction analysis, and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) as a meta-learner in a stacking framework. By leveraging SMOTE-ENN, the proposed approach enhances data balance and prevents overfitting. With synthetic data, the robustness and accuracy of the model have been improved, particularly in scenarios where fraudulent examples are scarce. The experiments conducted on real-world credit card transaction datasets have established that our approach outperforms existing methods, achieving higher metrics performance.