Identifying Fraudulent Credit Card Transactions Using Ensemble Machine Learning

Abstract

Credit card fraud is a big problem for banks and their consumers, and it costs a lot of money around the world. The data is quite unbalanced, making it difficult to identify fake transactions, which make up a very small fraction of all transactions. This study examines the utilization of machine learning methodologies for fraud detection, employing a publicly accessible dataset of credit card transactions conducted by European cardholders in September 2013. The dataset contains 284,807 transactions from two days, yet just 492 of these (0.172%) were found to be fraudulent. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) has changed all of the input variables except for the transaction amount and time to keep them private. In this work, we explore the difficulties of finding credit card fraud and try to look at the newest improvements in fraud detection methods, datasets, and evaluation standards. We list and assess the pros and cons of different ways to identify fraud. This study introduces a viable and reproducible methodology for detecting credit card fraud through supervised machine learning applied to a commonly utilized credit card dataset characterized by transactions over two days with significant imbalance. We talk about preprocessing, how to address very uneven class distributions, how to choose models, how to use evaluation metrics that work for rare-event detection, how to set up experiments, and what analysis we propose. We compare standard classifiers, including logistic regression, random forest, NB, and neural networks. We also talk about deployment issues and suggest future work.

Country : India

1 Riza Peerzade2 Riya Jadhav3 Sanika Pathare4 Manjushri Jadhav5 Prof. Nita Pawar6 Prof. Nita Pawar

  1. Student, Computer Engineering Diploma, Ajeenkya D. Y. Patil School of Engineering, Charholi, Pune, India
  2. Student, Computer Engineering Diploma, Ajeenkya D. Y. Patil School of Engineering, Charholi, Pune, India
  3. Student, Computer Engineering Diploma, Ajeenkya D. Y. Patil School of Engineering, Charholi, Pune, India
  4. Student, Computer Engineering Diploma, Ajeenkya D. Y. Patil School of Engineering, Charholi, Pune, India
  5. Guide, Professor, Computer Engineering Diploma, Ajeenkya D. Y. Patil School of Engineering, Charholi, Pune, India
  6. HoD, Professor, Computer Engineering Diploma, Ajeenkya D. Y. Patil School of Engineering, Charholi, Pune, India

IRJIET, Volume 9, Issue 12, December 2025 pp. 72-77

doi.org/10.47001/IRJIET/2025.912010

References

  1. Abdul Salam, Mustafa, et al. "Federated learning model for credit card fraud detection with data balancing techniques." Neural Computing and Applications 36.11 (2024): 6231-6256.
  2. Mosa, Diana T., et al. "CCFD: Efficient credit card fraud detection using meta-heuristic techniques and machine learning algorithms." Mathematics 12.14 (2024): 2250.
  3. Chung, Jiwon, and Kyungho Lee. "Credit card fraud detection: an improved strategy for high recall using KNN, LDA, and linear regression." Sensors 23.18 (2023): 7788.
  4. Nuthalapati, Aravind. "Smart fraud detection leveraging machine learning for credit card security." Educational Administration: Theory and Practice 29.2 (2023): 433-443.
  5. Afriyie, Jonathan Kwaku, et al. "A supervised machine learning algorithm for detecting and predicting fraud in credit card transactions." Decision Analytics Journal 6 (2023): 100163.
  6. Alfaiz, Noor Saleh, and Suliman Mohamed Fati. "Enhanced credit card fraud detection model using machine learning." Electronics 11.4 (2022): 662.
  7. Moradi, Fatemeh, M. Tarif, and M. Homaei. "A systematic review of machine learning in credit card fraud detection." Preprint, MDPI AG (2025).
  8. Theodorakopoulos, Leonidas, et al. "Big data-driven distributed machine learning for scalable credit card fraud detection using PySpark, XGBoost, and CatBoost." Electronics 14.9 (2025): 1754.
  9. Al-Maari, Al-Anood, et al. "Optimized Credit Card Fraud Detection Leveraging Ensemble Machine Learning Methods." Engineering, Technology & Applied Science Research 15.3 (2025): 22287-22294.
  10. Khalid, Abdul Rehman, et al. "Enhancing credit card fraud detection: an ensemble machine learning approach." Big Data and Cognitive Computing 8.1 (2024): 6.