Credit card fraud detection using hybridization of isolation forest with grey wolf optimizer algorithm

During recent decades, using credit cards represents a pivotal part of the financial lifeline. Credit cards and online payment gateways are vital elements in the world of world-wide-web. Given the fact that credit cards play an essential role in today's society, the misuse of these cards will lead to significant damages. One of the common ways to deal with these possible damages is using anomaly detection systems. These systems aim to take account of changes in customer and fraudsters’ behavior to detect anomaly patterns. In the current study, we present a model namely IF-GWO to learn fraudulent patterns through analyzing past transactions. The method employs a novel ensemble learning method using isolation forest (IF) and Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO). The experimental results indicate the priority of our presented fraud-detection system based on a noticeable number of credit card account transactions. Compared to the conventional model used for anomaly detection, the proposed model can detect more fraud accounts with fewer false positives over comparative procedures. Based on a comparison with other models using the dataset contains 284,807 transactions that are made by European cardholders, the proposed model outperformed the other approaches and achieved the highest performance in terms of F-Measure (93.52%), Area under receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) (94.17%), and G-means (94.10%). © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2024.