An adaptive oversampling method WRM-SMOTE for credit card fraud imbalanced datasets

Abstract

Online credit card transactions have witnessed a steady year-to-year growth, making fraud detection an increasingly critical challenge. Credit card fraud detection is particularly difficult due to the extreme class imbalance between fraudulent and non-fraudulent transactions. Imbalanced data, where one class heavily dominates the other, must be addressed before effective fraud detection can be achieved. Traditional oversampling techniques such as the Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE) and its variants often generate synthetic samples without considering the importance of ranking performance in the minority class distribution, leading to suboptimal classification performance. To address this, an adaptive Weight and rank-based Minority (WRM-SMOTE) oversampling method is proposed that prioritizes the performance and its relative ranking. To the best of our knowledge, WRM-SMOTE is among the first method to combine performance-based weighting and ranking across multiple SMOTE variants for adaptive oversampling. This method transforms imbalanced datasets into balanced ones through adaptive synthetic sample generation. The process begins by computing a weight based on two componentsabsolute performance and relative ranking. This is done to provide a distinction between two variants with extremely similar performance when one outperforms the other. Our experimental results on real-world credit card fraud datasets and eleven other benchmark datasets demonstrate that WRM-SMOTE significantly improves fraud detection performance, achieving higher precision and recall while maintaining a balanced false-positive rate compared to traditional oversampling methods. The proposed method effectively enhances classification accuracy by generating synthetic samples in high-impact regions thereby improving the robustness of fraud detection models.