Locating Potential Fraud

Fraud is deception that is perpetrated with either financial or personal gain in mind. Many people think about identity theft or credit card theft when thinking about fraud, but that’s only a very small part of the picture. A person claiming or being credited with another’s accomplishments or qualities is another form of fraud. The key word when thinking about fraud is deception, which takes many forms – for example, disinformation and hypocrisy. Consequently, it’s important to come up with a solid definition of what fraud is when working with ML applications and data, which is the goal of the first part of this chapter.

Determining fraud sources is essential with ML because fraud sources generate data – deceptive data. Yes, the data looks just fine, but when you study it in depth, it contains one or more of the five mistruths of data described in the Defining the human element section of Chapter 1, Defining Machine Learning...