Behavioral graph fraud detection in E-commerce

In e-commerce industry, graph neural network (GNN) methods are the new trends for transaction risk modeling. The power of graph algorithms lie in the capability to catch transaction linking network information, which is very hard to be captured by other algorithms. However, in most existing approaches, transaction or user connections are defined by “hard link” strategies on shared properties, such as same credit card, same device, same ip address, same shipping address, etc. Those types of strategies will result in sparse linkages by entities with strong identification characteristics (ie. device) and over-linkages by entities that could be widely shared (ie. ip address), making it more difficult to learn useful information from graph. To address aforementioned problems, we present a novel behavioral biometric based method to establish transaction linkings based on user behavioral similarities, then train an unsupervised GNN to extract embedding features for downstream fraud prediction tasks. To our knowledge, this is the first time similarity based “soft link” has been used in graph embedding applications. To speed up similarity calculation, we apply an in-house GPU based HDBSCAN clustering method to remove highly concentrated and isolated nodes before graph construction. Our experiments show that embedding features learned from similarity-based behavioral graph have achieved significant performance increase to the baseline fraud detection model in various business scenarios. In new/guest buyer transaction scenario, this segment is a challenge for traditional method, we can make precision increase from 0.82 to 0.86 at the same recall of 0.27, which means we can decrease false positive rate using this method.