Card fraud is an important issue and incurs a considerable cost for both cardholders and issuing banks. Contemporary methods apply machine learning-based approaches to detect fraudulent behavior from transaction records. But manually generating features needs domain knowledge and may lay behind the modus operandi of fraud, which means we need to automatically focus on the most relevant fraudulent behavior patterns in the online detection system. Therefore, in this work, we propose a spatial-temporal attention-based graph network (STAGN) for credit card fraud detection. In particular, we learn the temporal and location-based transaction graph features by a graph neural network first. Afterwards, we employ the spatial-temporal attention on top of learned tensor representations, which are then fed into a 3D convolution network. The attentional weights are jointly learned in an end-to-end manner with 3D convolution and detection networks. After that, we conduct extensive experiments on the real-word card transaction dataset. The result shows that STAGN performs better than other state-of-the-art baselines in both AUC and precision-recall curves. Moreover, we conduct empirical studies with domain experts on the proposed method for fraud detection and knowledge discovery; the result demonstrates its superiority in detecting suspicious transactions, mining spatial and temporal fraud hotspots, and uncover fraud patterns. The effectiveness of the proposed method in other user behavior-based tasks is also demonstrated. Finally, in order to tackle the challenges of big data, we integrate our proposed STAGN into the fraud detection system as the predictive model and present the implementation detail of each module in the system.
26 June 2023 in Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Credit card fraud incurs a considerable cost for both cardholders and issuing banks. Contemporary methods apply machine learning-based classifiers to detect fraudulent behavior from labeled transaction records. But labeled data are usually a small proportion of billions of real transactions due to expensive labeling costs, which implies that they do not well exploit many natural features from unlabeled data. Therefore, we propose a semi-supervised graph neural network for fraud detection. Specifically, we leverage transaction records to construct a temporal transaction graph, which is composed of temporal transactions (nodes) and interactions (edges) among them. Then we pass messages among the nodes through a Gated Temporal Attention Network (GTAN) to learn the transaction representation. We further model the fraud patterns through risk propagation among transactions. The extensive experiments are conducted on a real-world transaction dataset and two publicly available fraud detection datasets. The result shows that our proposed method, namely GTAN, outperforms other state-of-the-art baselines on three fraud detection datasets. Semi-supervised experiments demonstrate the excellent fraud detection performance of our model with only a tiny proportion of labeled data.
2 May 2023 in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
Anti-money laundering (AML) is a classical data mining problem in finance applications. As well known, money laundering (ML) is critical to the effective operation of transnational and organized crime, which affects a country's economy, government, and social wellbeings. Financial services organizations facilitate the movement of money and have been enlisted by governments to assist with the detection and prevention of money laundering, which is a key tool in the fight to reduce crime and create sustainable economic development. In the application of AML, user identity and financial behavior data are widely used to detect laundering transactions. In recent years, an increasing number of money laundering activities have been conducted by organized criminal gangs while most existing works still treat the actions of each account as independent identity behavior without considering the group-level conspired interactions. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a group-aware deep graph learning-based approach for organized money-laundering detection. In particular, we design a community-centric encoder to represent the nodes and attributes in user transaction graphs and derive the adjacent gang behaviors. Then, we devise a scheme of local enhancement to accommodate nodes with similar transaction features, which are aggregated into gangs for downstream detection. Extensive experiments on the real-world dataset from one of the largest bank card alliances worldwide show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both offline and online modes, showing the effectiveness of money laundering detection with group-aware deep graph learning.
11 April 2025 in Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Transformer-based and MLP-based methods have emerged as leading approaches in time series forecasting (TSF). However, real-world time series often show different patterns at different scales, and future changes are shaped by the interplay of these overlapping scales, requiring high-capacity models. While Transformer-based methods excel in capturing long-range dependencies, they suffer from high computational complexities and tend to overfit. Conversely, MLP-based methods offer computational efficiency and adeptness in modeling temporal dynamics, but they struggle with capturing temporal patterns with complex scales effectively. Based on the observation of multi-scale entanglement effect in time series, we propose a novel MLP-based Adaptive Multi-Scale Decomposition (AMD) framework for TSF. Our framework decomposes time series into distinct temporal patterns at multiple scales, leveraging the Multi-Scale Decomposable Mixing (MDM) block to dissect and aggregate these patterns. Complemented by the Dual Dependency Interaction (DDI) block and the Adaptive Multi-predictor Synthesis (AMS) block, our approach effectively models both temporal and channel dependencies and utilizes autocorrelation to refine multi-scale data integration. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate our AMD framework not only overcomes the limitations of existing methods but also consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance across various datasets.
28 February 2022 in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing
Named entity recognition (NER) isa preliminary task in natural language processing (NLP). Recognizing Chinese named entities from unstructured texts is challenging due to the lack of word boundaries. Even if performing Chinese Word Segmentation (CWS) could help to determine word boundaries, it is still difficult to determine which words should be clustered together for entity identification, since entities are often composed of multiple-segmented words. As dependency relationships between segmented words could help to determine entity boundaries, it is crucial to employ information related to syntactic dependency relationships to improve NER performance. In this paper, we propose a novel NER model to learn information about syntactic dependency graphs with graph neural networks, and merge learned information into the classic Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) - Conditional Random Field (CRF) NER scheme. In addition, we extract various kinds of task-specific hidden information from multiple CWS and part-of-speech (POS) tagging tasks, to further improve the NER model. We finally leverage multiple self-attention components to integrate multiple kinds of extracted information for named entity identification. Experimental results on three public benchmark datasets show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in most scenarios.
13 October 2020 in IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems
Under debt obligation promises, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can guarantee each other to enhance their financial security to get loans from commercial banks. When the economy rises, the banks may reduce the threshold to some extent, which may introduce default risk during the economy down period, especially when many SMEs bind together and form complex networks. The risk may diffuse across the guarantee network and may result in a financial crisis. Macroprudential oversight of the guarantee network to eliminate any potential systematics financial risk is the central task of the regulatory commission and the commercial banks. Based on our observation, the delinquent probability of an SME depends not only on self-financial status but also highly related to its temporal behaviors and structural position in networks. The classic approach for loan assessment criteria face challenges in extracting temporal and structural patterns from dynamic networks. To address these issues, we propose a temporal delinquent event prediction (TDEP) framework that preserves temporal network structures and credit behavior sequences in an end-to-end model. In particular, we first employ a graph attention layer to learn the representation of nodes in temporal guarantee networks. We then design a recursive and self-attention mechanism to integrate both credit behavior and network structure information. The learned attentional weights are leveraged to uncover high-risk guarantee patterns that effectively accelerate the risk assessment process. Afterward, we conduct extensive experiments in a real-world guaranteed-loan data set to evaluate its performance. The results show the effectiveness of our proposed approach compared with the state-of-the-art baselines. Finally, we integrate the proposed model in a real-world loan risk management system. We present the implementation details of each subcomponent of the system and report out the performance after online deployment.