Fraud detection is a cornerstone of recent e-commerce, but it’s also one of many least publicized domains in Machine Studying. That’s for a very good cause: it’s an adversarial area, the place fraudsters always invent new methods to bypass present fashions, and mannequin builders always invent new methods to catch them.
The objective of fraud detection methods is to dam fraudulent transactions, resembling these positioned by pretend accounts utilizing stolen bank cards, whereas on the identical time stopping any friction to the procuring expertise of real prospects. False negatives (fraud transactions that mistakenly went by the system) lead to financial loss also called ‘dangerous debt’ because of chargebacks initiated by the precise bank card house owners, whereas false positives (real transactions that had been blocked) lead to poor buyer expertise and churn.
Think about {that a} trendy e-commerce supplier might course of someplace within the order of tens of Tens of millions of orders per day, and that fraud charges are on the sub-percent degree, and also you’re beginning to see why it is a difficult area. It’s the final word needle-in-a-haystack drawback, the place the haystacks are overwhelmingly giant and…