Comparative analysis of binary and one-class classification techniques for credit card fraud data

Abstract The yearly increase in incidents of credit card fraud can be attributed to the rapid growth of e-commerce. To address this issue, effective fraud detection methods are essential. Our research focuses on the Credit Card Fraud Detection Dataset, which is a widely used dataset that contains real-world transaction data and is characterized by high class imbalance. This dataset has the potential to serve as a benchmark for credit card fraud detection. Our work evaluates the effectiveness of two supervised learning classification techniques, binary classification and one-class classification, for credit card fraud detection. The performance of five binary-class classification (BCC) learners and three one-class classification (OCC) learners is evaluated. The metrics used are area under the precision-recall curve (AUPRC) and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). Our results indicate that binary classification is a better approach for detecting credit card fraud than one-class classification, with the top binary classifier being CatBoost.