ROSFD: Robust Online Streaming Fraud Detection with Resilience to Concept Drift in Data Streams

Continuous generation of streaming data from diverse sources, such as online transactions and digital interactions, necessitates timely fraud detection. Traditional batch processing methods often struggle to capture the rapidly evolving patterns of fraudulent activities. This paper highlights the critical importance of processing streaming data for effective fraud detection. To address the inherent challenges of latency, scalability, and concept drift in streaming environments, we propose a robust online streaming fraud detection (ROSFD) framework. Our proposed framework comprises two key stages: (i) Stage One: Offline Model Initialization. In this initial stage, a model is built in offline settings using incremental learning principles to overcome the "cold-start" problem. (ii) Stage Two: Real-time Model Adaptation. In this dynamic stage, drift detection algorithms (viz.,, DDM, EDDM, and ADWIN) are employed to identify concept drift in the incoming data stream and incrementally train the model accordingly. This "train-only-when-required" strategy drastically reduces the number of retrains needed without significantly impacting the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). Overall, ROSFD utilizing ADWIN as the drift detection method demonstrated the best performance among the employed methods. In terms of model efficacy, Adaptive Random Forest consistently outperformed other models, achieving the highest AUC in four out of five datasets.