• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.93-116
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• 2010

Ensemble approach is applied to the detection modeling of illegal cash accommodation (ICA) that is the well-known type of fraudulent usages of credit cards in far east nations and has not been addressed in the academic literatures. The performance of fraud detection model (FDM) suffers from the imbalanced data problem, which can be remedied to some extent using an ensemble of many classifiers. It is generally accepted that ensembles of classifiers produce better accuracy than a single classifier provided there is diversity in the ensemble. Furthermore, recent researches reveal that it may be better to ensemble some selected classifiers instead of all of the classifiers at hand. For the effective detection of ICA, we adopt ensemble size reduction technique that prunes the ensemble of all classifiers using accuracy and diversity measures. The diversity in ensemble manifests itself as disagreement or ambiguity among members. Data imbalance intrinsic to FDM affects our approach for ICA detection in two ways. First, we suggest the training procedure with over-sampling methods to obtain diverse training data sets. Second, we use some variants of accuracy and diversity measures that focus on fraud class. We also dynamically calculate the diversity measure-Forward Addition and Backward Elimination. In our experiments, Neural Networks, Decision Trees and Logit Regressions are the base models as the ensemble members and the performance of homogeneous ensembles are compared with that of heterogeneous ensembles. The experimental results show that the reduced size ensemble is as accurate on average over the data-sets tested as the non-pruned version, which provides benefits in terms of its application efficiency and reduced complexity of the ensemble.