It is important that credit card companies are able to recognize fraudulent credit card transactions so that customers are not charged for items that they did not purchase.
The datasets contains transactions made by credit cards in September 2013 by european cardholders. This dataset presents transactions that occurred in two days, where we have 492 frauds out of 284,807 transactions. The dataset is highly unbalanced, the positive class (frauds) account for 0.172% of all transactions.
Download the Dataset from here.
Now it is time to start building the model .The types of algorithms we are going to use to try to do anomaly detection on this dataset are as follows
One of the newest techniques to detect anomalies is called Isolation Forests. The algorithm is based on the fact that anomalies are data points that are few and different. As a result of these properties, anomalies are susceptible to a mechanism called isolation.
This method is highly useful and is fundamentally different from all existing methods. It introduces the use of isolation as a more effective and efficient means to detect anomalies than the commonly used basic distance and density measures. Moreover, this method is an algorithm with a low linear time complexity and a small memory requirement. It builds a good performing model with a small number of trees using small sub-samples of fixed size, regardless of the size of a data set.
Typical machine learning methods tend to work better when the patterns they try to learn are balanced, meaning the same amount of good and bad behaviors are present in the dataset.
How Isolation Forests Work The Isolation Forest algorithm isolates observations by randomly selecting a feature and then randomly selecting a split value between the maximum and minimum values of the selected feature. The logic argument goes: isolating anomaly observations is easier because only a few conditions are needed to separate those cases from the normal observations. On the other hand, isolating normal observations require more conditions. Therefore, an anomaly score can be calculated as the number of conditions required to separate a given observation.
The way that the algorithm constructs the separation is by first creating isolation trees, or random decision trees. Then, the score is calculated as the path length to isolate the observation.
The LOF algorithm is an unsupervised outlier detection method which computes the local density deviation of a given data point with respect to its neighbors. It considers as outlier samples that have a substantially lower density than their neighbors.
The number of neighbors considered, (parameter n_neighbors) is typically chosen 1) greater than the minimum number of objects a cluster has to contain, so that other objects can be local outliers relative to this cluster, and 2) smaller than the maximum number of close by objects that can potentially be local outliers. In practice, such informations are generally not available, and taking n_neighbors=20 appears to work well in general.