A Hybrid Deep Learning Approach with Generative Adversarial Network for Credit Card Fraud Detection

Ibomoiye Domor Mienye, Theo G. Swart

Credit card fraud detection is a critical challenge in the financial industry, with substantial economic implications. Conventional machine learning (ML) techniques often fail to adapt to evolving fraud patterns and underperform with imbalanced datasets. This study proposes a hybrid deep learning framework that integrates Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) with Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) to enhance fraud detection capabilities. The GAN component generates realistic synthetic fraudulent transactions, addressing data imbalance and enhancing the training set. The discriminator, implemented using various DL architectures, including Simple RNN, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, and Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs), is trained to distinguish between real and synthetic transactions and further fine-tuned to classify transactions as fraudulent or legitimate. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements over traditional methods, with the GAN-GRU model achieving a sensitivity of 0.992 and specificity of 1.000 on the European credit card dataset. This work highlights the potential of GANs combined with deep learning architectures to provide a more effective and adaptable solution for credit card fraud detection.