# Fighting Money Laundering with Statistics and Machine Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.04207 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04207/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 61 of its 183 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Jan 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 61)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- ["Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04938/) (2016)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [Deep Inside Convolutional Networks: Visualising Image Classification Models and Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6034/) (2013)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [A Survey on Bias and Fairness in Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09635/) (2019)
- [How transferable are features in deep neural networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1792/) (2014)
- [Fast and Accurate Deep Network Learning by Exponential Linear Units (ELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07289/) (2015)
- [Effective Approaches to Attention-based Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.04025/) (2015)
- [Mitigating Unwanted Biases with Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07593/) (2018)
- [Self-Normalizing Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02515/) (2017)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Rectified Activations in Convolutional Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00853/) (2015)
- [EvolveGCN: Evolving Graph Convolutional Networks for Dynamic Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10191/) (2019)
- [Techniques for Interpretable Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00033/) (2018)
- [Time Series Data Augmentation for Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12478/) (2020)
- [The Variational Fair Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00830/) (2015)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Engineering the Law-Machine Learning Translation Problem: Developing Legally Aligned Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16969/) (2025)
- [Leveraging Ensemble-Based Semi-Supervised Learning for Illicit Account Detection in Ethereum DeFi Transactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02408/) (2024)
- [Deep Learning Approaches for Anti-Money Laundering on Mobile Transactions: Review, Framework, and Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10058/) (2025)
- [Advances in Continual Graph Learning for Anti-Money Laundering Systems: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24259/) (2025)
- [Combating Financial Crimes with Unsupervised Learning Techniques: Clustering and Dimensionality Reduction for Anti-Money Laundering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00777/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Money laundering is a profound global problem. Nonetheless, there is little scientific literature on statistical and machine learning methods for anti-money laundering. In this paper, we focus on anti-money laundering in banks and provide an introduction and review of the literature. We propose a unifying terminology with two central elements: (i) client risk profiling and (ii) suspicious behavior flagging. We find that client risk profiling is characterized by diagnostics, i.e., efforts to find and explain risk factors. On the other hand, suspicious behavior flagging is characterized by non-disclosed features and hand-crafted risk indices. Finally, we discuss directions for future research. One major challenge is the need for more public data sets. This may potentially be addressed by synthetic data generation. Other possible research directions include semi-supervised and deep learning, interpretability, and fairness of the results.