Fraud detection in bank transaction with wrapper model and Harris water optimization-based deep recurrent neural network

Purpose Fraud transaction detection has become a significant factor in the communication technologies and electronic commerce systems, as it affects the usage of electronic payment. Even though, various fraud detection methods are developed, enhancing the performance of electronic payment by detecting the fraudsters results in a great challenge in the bank transaction. Design/methodology/approach This paper aims to design the fraud detection mechanism using the proposed Harris water optimization-based deep recurrent neural network (HWO-based deep RNN). The proposed fraud detection strategy includes three different phases, namely, pre-processing, feature selection and fraud detection. Initially, the input transactional data is subjected to the pre-processing phase, where the data is pre-processed using the Box-Cox transformation to remove the redundant and noise values from data. The pre-processed data is passed to the feature selection phase, where the essential and the suitable features are selected using the wrapper model. The selected feature makes the classifier to perform better detection performance. Finally, the selected features are fed to the detection phase, where the deep recurrent neural network classifier is used to achieve the fraud detection process such that the training process of the classifier is done by the proposed Harris water optimization algorithm, which is the integration of water wave optimization and Harris hawks optimization. Findings Moreover, the proposed HWO-based deep RNN obtained better performance in terms of the metrics, such as accuracy, sensitivity and specificity with the values of 0.9192, 0.7642 and 0.9943. Originality/value An effective fraud detection method named HWO-based deep RNN is designed to detect the frauds in the bank transaction. The optimal features selected using the wrapper model enable the classifier to find fraudulent activities more efficiently. However, the accurate detection result is evaluated through the optimization model based on the fitness measure such that the function with the minimal error value is declared as the best solution, as it yields better detection results.