Differential evolution technique on weighted voting stacking ensemble method for credit card fraud detection

Differential Evolution is an optimization technique of stochastic search for a population-based vector, which is powerful and efficient over a continuous space for solving differentiable and non-linear optimization problems. Weighted voting stacking ensemble method is an important technique that combines various classifier models. However, selecting the appropriate weights of classifier models for the correct classification of transactions is a problem. This research study is therefore aimed at exploring whether the Differential Evolution optimization method is a good approach for defining the weighting function. Manual and random selection of weights for voting credit card transactions has previously been carried out. However, a large number of fraudulent transactions were not detected by the classifier models. Which means that a technique to overcome the weaknesses of the classifier models is required. Thus, the problem of selecting the appropriate weights was viewed as the problem of weights optimization in this study. The dataset was downloaded from the Kaggle competition data repository. Various machine learning algorithms were used to weight vote a class of transaction. The differential evolution optimization techniques was used as a weighting function. In addition, the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) and Safe Level Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SL-SMOTE) oversampling algorithms were modified to preserve the definition of SMOTE while improving the performance. Result generated from this research study showed that the Differential Evolution Optimization method is a good weighting function, which can be adopted as a systematic weight function for weight voting stacking ensemble method of various classification methods.School of ComputingM. Sc. (Computing