Industry paper: The uncertain case of credit card fraud detection

Abstract

Uncertainty is inherent in many real-time event-driven applications. Credit card fraud detection is a typical uncertain domain, where potential fraud incidents must be detected in real time and tagged before the transaction has been accepted or denied. We present extensions to the IBM Proactive Technology Online (PROTON) open source tool to cope with uncertainty. The inclusion of uncertainty aspects impacts all levels of the architecture and logic of an event processing engine. The extensions implemented in PROTON include the addition of new built-in attributes and functions, support for new types of operands, and support for event processing patterns to cope with all these. The new capabilities were implemented as building blocks and basic primitives in the complex event processing programmatic language. This enables implementation of event-driven applications possessing uncertainty aspects from different domains in a generic manner. A first application was devised in the domain of credit card fraud detection. Our preliminary results are encouraging, showing potential benefits that stem from incorporating uncertainty aspects to the domain of credit card fraud detection.