Credit Card Fraud Detection Using Cortical Learning Algorithm

As financial institutions in the world drive towards achieving a cashless economy, by increasing citizens spending power and reducing the high cost of money handling, the use of credit cards is of great necessity for this purpose, hence, with this new drive for a cashless economy, there will be significant increase of the use of credit card and also fraudulent activities associated with it. This work serves as a proactive measure in detecting fraudulent activities regarding the credit card. The study presents a hierarchical temporal memory based model that can detect fraudulent transactions carried out with the use of credit card. A novel approach in machine learning known as the Cortical Learning Algorithm was adopted to build the credit card fraud detection model. The algorithm worked on the credit card data obtained from the UCI Repository, it converted the highly populated data to a sparse representation, and then used its learning columns to learn spatial patterns. The Object Oriented Analysis and Design methodology was used in this work and was implemented using Java programming language. The resulting model performed online learning and recorded high percentage accuracy.