Billions of dollars of loss are caused every year by fraudulent credit card transactions. The design of efficient fraud detection algorithms is key for reducing these losses, and more and more algorithms rely on advanced machine learning techniques to assist fraud investigators. The design of fraud detection algorithms is however particularly challenging due to the non-stationary distribution of the data, the highly unbalanced classes distributions and the availability of few transactions labeled by fraud investigators. At the same time public data are scarcely available for confidentiality issues, leaving unanswered many questions about what is the best strategy. In this thesis we aim to provide some answers by focusing on crucial issues such as: i) why and how undersampling is useful in the presence of class imbalance (i.e. frauds are a small percentage of the transactions), ii) how to deal with unbalanced and evolving data streams (non-stationarity due to fraud evolution and change of spending behavior), iii) how to assess performances in a way which is relevant for detection and iv) how to use feedbacks provided by investigators on the fraud alerts generated. Finally, we design and assess a prototype of a Fraud Detection System able to meet real-world working conditions and that is able to integrate investigators’ feedback to generate accurate alerts. / Doctorat en Sciences / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

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