OpenDrift: Online Evolving Fraud Detection for Open-Category and Concept-Drift Transactions

The rapid growth of electronic commerce brings convenience to modern life but comes with security risks by various cybercrimes in online payment services. Most existing security methods for fraud detection depend on the static learning paradigm, which trains a model over a static training dataset and deploys the trained model for inference with the frozen model parameters under the i.i.d. assumption. Unfortunately, this paradigm becomes incommensurate with the increasingly complicated and varying fraud patterns due to the untimely and delayed responses in the offline environment. Without sensing the evolution of fraud timely, it is challenging to train and deploy targeted countermeasures. The emerging means of fraud are not only reflected in the openness of their category, but also in the drift of their superimposed risk features. The interweaving of open-category and concept drift accelerates the process of existing methods becoming powerless. In this paper, we propose EvoFD, an online evolving fraud detection framework to enable continual learning to cope with undercurrent surges of evolving fraud. The core idea of EvoFD is to weaken the bias caused by the anchoring effect on the learned information. It learns in an online streaming fashion by using instructive representations as anchors. Specially, we maintain the progressively updatable class anchors and optimize the representation network to embed features and class anchors into a unified normalized space, where the training and predicting can be conducted simultaneously or independently. In the framework, we preserve the balanced replay memory for each class to accumulate knowledge and avoid forgetting. The advantages of our method are validated by extensive experiments over the real-world dataset from a prestigious bank.