Fraudulent Detection Model Using Machine Learning Techniques for Unstructured Supplementary Service Data

Abstract

The increase in mobile phones accessibility and technological advancement in almost every corner of the world has shaped how banks offer financial service. Such services were extended to low-end customers without a smartphone providing Alternative Banking Channels (ABCs) service, rendering regular financial service same as those on smartphones. One of the services of this ABC’s is Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD), two-way communication between mobile phones and applications, which is used to render financial services all from the bank accounts linked for this USSD service. Fraudsters have taken advantage of innocent customers on this channel to carry out fraudulent activities with high impart of fraudulent there is still not an implemented fraud detection model to detect this fraud activities. This paper is an investigation into fraud detection model using machine learning techniques for Unstructured Supplementary Service Data based on short-term memory. Statistical features were derived by aggregating customers activities using a short window size to improve the model performance on selected machine learning classifiers, employing the best set of features to improve the model performance. Based on the results obtained, the proposed Fraudulent detection model demonstrated that with the appropriate machine learning techniques for USSD,  best performance was achieved with Random forest having the best result of 100% across all its performance measure, KNeighbors was second in performance measure having an average of 99% across all its performance measure while Gradient boosting was third in its performance measure, its achieved accuracy is 91.94%, precession is 86%, recall is 100% and f1 score is 92.54%. Result obtained shows two of the selected machine learning random forest and decision tree are best fit for the fraud detection in this model. With the right features derived and an appropriate machine learning algorithm, the proposed model offers the best fraud detection accuracy.