This project focuses on creating a robust fraud detection scheme for credit card transactions, utilizing the data science techniques learned during the Introduction to Data Science course at the University of Florida. Our objective is to utilize the predictive capabilities of Random Forest as a powerful model to accurately identify fraudulent transactions. Through the training and optimization of our model, we aim to mitigate financial losses for businesses and customers alike, ensuring their protection and safeguarding their interests.

We will be utilizing the Credit Card Fraud Detection dataset obtained from Kaggle. This dataset contains transactions made by European customers over a two-day period in September 2013. It consists of 284,807 transactions, with 492 identified as fraudulent. Additionally, this dataset presents a class imbalance issue. The dataset primarily consists of numerical values resulting from a PCA transformation (for customer privacy), with the exception of 'Time' and 'Amount.' Although the specific features are unknown, our analysis will focus on determining the most significant numerical features.

Credit Card Fraud Detection https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/mlg-ulb/creditcardfraud

Numerous global transactions are conducted through credit cards, but determining the authenticity of a transaction poses a challenge. The task at hand is to effectively process and analyze these transactions in real-time, aiming to distinguish between fraudulent and legitimate ones. This endeavor is highly intricate, if not unattainable, without leveraging the computational power of computers to undertake this task on our behalf, especially considering the imbalances in data distribution. Our objective is to develop a machine learning-based fraud detection system that can successfully address this classification issue.

The two evaluation metrics we will focus on are F-1 score and Area Under the Precision-Recall Curve (AUPRC). These techniques are of use to us specifically because they account for imbalances in the dataset. Fraudulent transactions can often exhibit complex and non-linear patterns which make certain metrics like the confusion matrix less desirable. The F1 score will be a suitable choice when you want a balanced evaluation metric that considers both precision and recall and it handles imbalanced class distributions. AUPRC is useful when the focus is on the performance of the minority class, especially in imbalance datasets. It provides a comprehensive evaluation by considering the precision and recall trade-off at various threshold settings. If we find that these two metrics are not enough, we will incorporate other evaluation metrics and document it in our final project report.

The baseline techniques used for a Random Forest Classification (RFC) and XGBoost in our project’s case involves the following steps.

Ensure you have Python installed (preferably version 3.9) on your system.

This project is intended to be run using Jupyter Notebook. If you don't have Jupyter Notebook installed, you can install it using the following command: pip install jupyter

Install the required packages by running the following command in your terminal or command prompt: pip install numpy pandas matplotlib seaborn plotly scikit-learn imbalanced-learn Pillow plotly_express xgboost

1. Install PyCharm: If you haven't already, download and install PyCharm from the official website: PyCharm Download.

2. Open Project: Open your project in PyCharm.

3. Create or Open Jupyter Notebook:

   • If you have an existing Jupyter Notebook file (with .ipynb extension), you can directly open it in PyCharm.
   • If you don't have an existing Jupyter Notebook, you can create a new one by right-clicking on the project folder in the Project Explorer, selecting "New" > "Python File," and giving it a .ipynb extension.

4. Activate Virtual Environment (Optional):

   • If you're using a virtual environment, make sure to activate it using the PyCharm terminal. This ensures that the Jupyter Notebook runs in the correct environment.
   • To activate the virtual environment: source path_to_your_virtual_environment/bin/activate

5. Run Jupyter Notebook:

   • Open the Jupyter Notebook file in the PyCharm editor.
   • You can run each cell by clicking on it and then clicking the "Run" button in the cell toolbar or using the keyboard shortcut Shift + Enter.
   • Alternatively, you can run all cells by selecting "Run" > "Run All Cells" from the Jupyter Notebook menu.

1. Importing Libraries:

   • The code begins by importing necessary libraries for data analysis and visualization.

2. Loading Dataset:

   • The dataset is loaded from the specified CSV file path using the pd.read_csv() function.

3. Data Exploration and Visualization:

   • The shape of the dataset is printed using data.shape.
   • A pie chart is created using Plotly Express (px.pie()) to visualize the distribution of fraud vs. valid transactions.
   • Fraudulent and valid transactions are separated and their counts are displayed.
   • Descriptive statistics for the 'Amount' column are computed and printed for both fraudulent and valid transactions.
   • A correlation matrix heatmap is created using Seaborn to visualize the correlation between features.

4. Data Preprocessing:

   • The target variable 'Class' is separated from the features to create X (features) and Y (target) arrays.
   • The dataset is split into training and testing sets using train_test_split() from scikit-learn.

5. Random Forest Classifier:

   • The RandomForestClassifier from scikit-learn is imported.
   • An instance of the classifier is created with a specified number of estimators.
   • The model is trained using the rebalanced training data.

6. XGBoost:

   • The XGBClassifier from xgboost is imported.
   • An instance of the classifier is created.
   • The model is trained using the rebalanced training data.

7. Prediction and Evaluation:

   • The model's predictions are obtained using predict() on the test data. We used SMOTE only in the RFC, but applied NearMiss and SMOTE to both models.
   • Various evaluation metrics (accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, AUPRC) are computed using scikit-learn's metrics functions.
   • The evaluation results are displayed and visualized using a bar chart.

8. Precision-Recall Curve:

   • The precision-recall curve and display are created using scikit-learn's precision_recall_curve() and PrecisionRecallDisplay() functions.

Make sure to replace the CSV file path with the correct path to your "creditcard.csv" dataset file. The code involves data visualization and analysis, handling class imbalance, and training and evaluating a Random Forest Classifier for fraud detection.

[1] Kiran Deep Singh, P. Singh, and Sandeep Singh Kang, “Ensembled-based credit card fraud detection in online transactions,” Jan. 2022, doi: https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0108873.

[2] C. Whitrow, D. J. Hand, P. Juszczak, D. Weston, and N. M. Adams, “Transaction aggregation as a strategy for credit card fraud detection,” Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 30–55, Jul. 2008, doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10618-008-0116-z.

[3] “Nearmiss,” Imbalanced-learn, https://imbalanced-learn.org/dev/references/generated/imblearn.under_sampling.NearMiss.html (accessed Aug. 8, 2023).

[4] “SMOTE,” Imbalanced-learn, https://imbalanced-learn.org/dev/references/generated/imblearn.over_sampling.SMOTE.html (accessed Aug. 8, 2023).

[5] A. Gupta, “XGBoost versus Random Forest,” Medium, https://medium.com/geekculture/xgboost-versus-random-forest-898e42870f30 (accessed Aug. 8, 2023).