QFDNN: A Resource-Efficient Variational Quantum Feature Deep Neural Networks for Fraud Detection and Loan Prediction

Social financial technology focuses on trust, sustainability, and social responsibility, which require advanced technologies to address complex financial tasks in the digital era. With the rapid growth in online transactions, automating credit card fraud detection and loan eligibility prediction has become increasingly challenging. Classical machine learning (ML) models have been used to solve these challenges; however, these approaches often encounter scalability, overfitting, and high computational costs due to complexity and high-dimensional financial data. Quantum computing (QC) and quantum machine learning (QML) provide a promising solution to efficiently processing high-dimensional datasets and enabling real-time identification of subtle fraud patterns. However, existing quantum algorithms lack robustness in noisy environments and fail to optimize performance with reduced feature sets. To address these limitations, we propose a quantum feature deep neural network (QFDNN), a novel, resource efficient, and noise-resilient quantum model that optimizes feature representation while requiring fewer qubits and simpler variational circuits. The model is evaluated using credit card fraud detection and loan eligibility prediction datasets, achieving competitive accuracies of 82.2% and 74.4%, respectively, with reduced computational overhead. Furthermore, we test QFDNN against six noise models, demonstrating its robustness across various error conditions. Our findings highlight QFDNN potential to enhance trust and security in social financial technology by accurately detecting fraudulent transactions while supporting sustainability through its resource-efficient design and minimal computational overhead.