Credit card fraud is a burden for organizations across the globe. Specifically, $24.26 billion were lost due to credit card fraud worldwide in 2018, according to shiftprocessing.com. In this project, our goal was to build an effective and efficient model to predict fraud. We analyzed a real-world dataset that contained a list of government related credit card transactions over the 2010 calendar year. The data presented a supervised problem as it included a column showing the transaction’s fraud label (whether a transaction was fraudulent or not). It also contained identifying information about each transaction such as the credit card number, merchant, merchant state, etc. The dataset had 96,753 records and 10 data fields. We first described and visualized each of the 10 data fields, cleaned the dataset, and filled in missing values. Then we created many variables and performed feature selection. Finally, we created a variety of machine learning models (both linear and nonlinear) and highlighted our results.
