Machine Learning for Unsupervised Fraud Detection

Abstract: Fraud is a threat that most online service providers must address in the development of their systems to ensure an efficient security policy and the integrity of their revenue. Amadeus, a Global Distribution System providing a transaction platform for flight booking by travel agents, is targeted by fraud attempts that could lead to revenue losses and indemnifications. The objective of this thesis is to detect fraud attempts by applying machine learning algorithms to bookings represented by Passenger Name Record history. Due to the lack of labelled data, the current study presents a benchmark of unsupervised algorithms and aggregation methods. It also describes anomaly detection techniques which can be applied to self-organizing maps and hierarchical clustering. Considering the important amount of transactions per second processed by Amadeus back-ends, we eventually highlight potential bottlenecks and alternatives.