Graph-Based Financial Fraud Detection with Calibrated Risk Scoring and Structural Regularization

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Authors: Yunfei Nie, Yi-Xiang Wang, Ruobing Yan, Yuhan Wang, Zouxiaowei Ma, Yilun Wu
Cited by: 12
References: 7

Abstract

Financial transaction fraud prevention faces challenges such as complex relationship structures, concealed behavioral patterns, and dynamically changing data distribution. Discrimination models relying solely on independent sample features are insufficient to fully characterize the risks of group collaboration and chain transfers within transaction networks. This paper proposes a graph neural network representation learning and risk discrimination framework for financial transaction fraud prevention. It integrates transaction records and identity information into node attributes and constructs a transaction graph based on shared attributes and interaction consistency to explicitly model inter-transaction relationships. In model design, a multi-layer message passing mechanism is employed to aggregate neighborhood information, learn node embedding representations containing structural context semantics, and output transaction-level fraud probability and risk scores through a lightweight risk discrimination head. A weighted supervision objective is introduced to mitigate training bias caused by class imbalance, and structural consistency regularization constraints are combined to suppress the impact of noisy edges on representation drift, thereby improving the stability and usability of risk characterization. Experiments are conducted on a publicly available financial transaction dataset, comparing various methods in the same direction and comprehensively evaluating them under a unified evaluation protocol. The results show that the proposed method outperforms other methods in risk ranking and probability calibration quality, validating the effectiveness of graph structure modeling and representation learning collaboration in financial transaction fraud prevention.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Imbalanced Data Classification Techniques Financial Distress and Bankruptcy Prediction Advanced Graph Neural Networks

Publication details

Journal / source
Proceedings of the 2026 International Conference on AI Decision-Making and Management
Publisher
ACM
Pages
169–176
Publication date
6 March 2026