Credit card fraud detection is a critical task in the financial industry. Its primary goal is to identify and prevent fraudulent transactions, ensuring that legitimate cardholders are not charged for unauthorized purchases.
Gather relevant data from various sources. Ensure the data is representative of the problem you want to solve. Data can be in different formats (CSV, databases, APIs, etc.).
Clean the data by handling missing values, outliers, and inconsistencies. Perform feature engineering (creating new features, encoding categorical variables, scaling features). Split the data into training and test sets.
Choose an appropriate algorithm based on your problem type (classification, regression, clustering, etc.). Consider factors like interpretability, scalability, and performance.
Feed the training data into the chosen model. The model learns from the data and adjusts its internal parameters. Iteratively improve the model by adjusting hyperparameters.
Use the test set to evaluate how well the model generalizes to unseen data. Common evaluation metrics include accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and area under the ROC curve (AUC).
Fine-tune hyperparameters (e.g., learning rate, regularization strength) to improve performance. Use techniques like cross-validation to find the best settings.