There are many techniques for building Fraud Detection systems. It can be:
- Rule Based (tribal knowledge codified)
- Machine Learning (detect anomalies, patterns, etc.)
A graph network can assist identify hidden aspects of transactions that would otherwise be missed just by looking at data in a relational table.
Lets consider the example of indenfying fraud in a simple financial transaction. Every financial transaction has thousands of attributes associated with is - e.g. amount, IP address, browser, OS, cookie data, bank, geo-location, card details, recepient,etc.
Once the graph is created, there are many techniques that can be used to detect patterns and relationships between the different attributes.
- Link Analysis: This approach is used to detect unusual links between network items. In a financial network, for example, you may check for linkages between accounts engaged in fraudulent activities.
- Anomaly detection: This approach is used to identify entities or transactions that differ from usual behaviour in a network. In a credit card network, for example, you may watch for transactions performed from strange areas or for abnormally big sums.
- Cluster Analysis: This technique is used to identify groups of entities in a network that are closely connected to each other. Clustering may also be used to surface commercial ties or social circles in a transaction banking graph.
Because of their capacity to track complicated chains of transactions, graph databases are particularly useful in financial crime use cases and fraud detection graph analysis. Traditional RDBMS struggle with these sequence of connections because multiple recursive inner joins are necessary to accomplish this sort of traversal query in SQL, which is very challenging.
A few articles that give good illustrations on this topic: