We wanted to explore new APIs while also solving a real-world problem. Many fraud detection systems are based solely on heuristics, but we wanted to try using machine learning techniques.
What it does
Queries CapitalOne's Nessie API for a user's transactions
Trains a SVM, and continuously queries for new transactions
Looks for anomalies using the SVM
If an anomaly is detected, send the user a text message with the details of the offending transaction(s)
How we built it
Since the Capital One API didn't have a good Python wrapper, we first built a complete python wrapper for the API that covers all the endpoints.
For classification we decided to use a support vector machine provided by the scikit-learn package.
After initially getting a user's transactions and training the SVM on them we continuously query the API for new transactions. We classify the new transactions using the SVM.
If the transaction trips our SVM, then we use the Twilio API to send the user a text message.
Challenges we ran into
The biggest challenge we had was reliably classifying transactions. We ended up using only 3 parameters: amount and the longitude and latitude of the merchant. We only started getting reliable predictions after we normalized the inputs to a range from 0 to 1
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The complete API wrapper for the Capital One API.
Choosing and fine-tuning the right machine learning model.
What we learned
Gained more experience with machine learning classification
Used some new APIs
What's next for Fraud Alert
We would like to ask the user for a confirmation on whether the transaction was actually fraudulent or not. If it was, then we would cancel the purchase.
We would also like to keep track of the user's budget and alert them if they are close to exceeding it.
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