Abstract
The increased level of financial transactions before and specifically
after the influx of COVID-19 has heightened the activities of fraudsters
in the mobile money sector. This calls for the development of robust
systems that would effectively detect and if possible prevent these
unscrupulous occurrences to a large extent. The features of mobile money
transactions dataset are highly unstructured, and therefore need to be
streamlined using a powerful supervised machine learning tool. Genetic
Algorithm has been proposed as an effective feature selection method in
this paper. Selected machine learning algorithms were used to further
build the models for the fraud detection system. These ML techniques
include Artificial Neural Networks, Random Forest, Naïve Bayes, Decision
Trees and Logistic Regression. In order to test the efficacy of the
classifiers, the performance of the models were validated using mobile
money dataset obtained from kaggle database. The findings from this work
have clearly proven that the proposed algorithm used for the feature
selection exhibits greater efficiency than the existing machine learning
techniques.