Enhancing credit card fraud detection with a stacking-based hybrid machine learning approach

The swift progression of technology has increased the complexity of cyber fraud, posing an escalating challenge for the banking sector to reliably and efficiently identify fraudulent credit card transactions. Conventional detection approaches fail to adapt to the advancing strategies of fraudsters, resulting in heightened false positives and inefficiency within fraud detection systems. This study overcomes these restrictions by creating an innovative stacking hybrid machine learning (ML) approach that combines decision trees (DT), random forests (RF), support vector machines (SVM), XGBoost, CatBoost, and logistic regression (LR) within a stacking ensemble framework. This method uses stacking to integrate diverse ML models, enhancing predictive performance, with a meta-model consolidating base model predictions, resulting in superior detection accuracy compared to any single model. The methodology utilizes sophisticated data preprocessing techniques, such as correlation-based feature selection and principal component analysis (PCA), to enhance computing efficiency while preserving essential information. Experimental assessments of a credit card transaction dataset reveal that the stacking ensemble model exhibits higher performance, achieving an F1-score of 88.14%, thereby efficiently balancing precision and recall. This outcome highlights the significance of ensemble methods such as stacking in attaining strong and dependable cyber fraud detection, emphasizing its capacity to markedly enhance the security of financial transactions.