Detection of Fraud Symptoms in the Retail Industry

Data mining is one of the most effective methods for fraud detection. This is highlighted by 25% of organizations that have suffered from economic crimes [1]. This paper presents a case study using real-world data from a large retail company. We identify symptoms of fraud by looking for outliers. To identify the outliers and the context where outliers appear, we learn a regression tree. For a given node, we identify the outliers using the set of examples covered at that node, and the context as the conjunction of the conditions in the path from the root to the node. Surprisingly, at different nodes of the tree, we observe that some outliers disappear and new ones appear. From the business point of view, the outliers that are detected near the leaves of the tree are the most suspicious ones. These are cases of difficult detection, being observed only in a given context, defined by a set of rules associated with the node.