Realistic Synthetic Financial Transactions for Anti-Money Laundering Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Altman, Erik, Blanuša, Jovan, von Niederhäusern, Luc, Egressy, Béni, Anghel, Andreea, Atasu, Kubilay
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Altman, Erik
Blanuša, Jovan
von Niederhäusern, Luc
Egressy, Béni
Anghel, Andreea
Atasu, Kubilay
author_facet Altman, Erik
Blanuša, Jovan
von Niederhäusern, Luc
Egressy, Béni
Anghel, Andreea
Atasu, Kubilay
contents With the widespread digitization of finance and the increasing popularity of cryptocurrencies, the sophistication of fraud schemes devised by cybercriminals is growing. Money laundering -- the movement of illicit funds to conceal their origins -- can cross bank and national boundaries, producing complex transaction patterns. The UN estimates 2-5\% of global GDP or \$0.8 - \$2.0 trillion dollars are laundered globally each year. Unfortunately, real data to train machine learning models to detect laundering is generally not available, and previous synthetic data generators have had significant shortcomings. A realistic, standardized, publicly-available benchmark is needed for comparing models and for the advancement of the area. To this end, this paper contributes a synthetic financial transaction dataset generator and a set of synthetically generated AML (Anti-Money Laundering) datasets. We have calibrated this agent-based generator to match real transactions as closely as possible and made the datasets public. We describe the generator in detail and demonstrate how the datasets generated can help compare different machine learning models in terms of their AML abilities. In a key way, using synthetic data in these comparisons can be even better than using real data: the ground truth labels are complete, whilst many laundering transactions in real data are never detected.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2306_16424
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Realistic Synthetic Financial Transactions for Anti-Money Laundering Models
Altman, Erik
Blanuša, Jovan
von Niederhäusern, Luc
Egressy, Béni
Anghel, Andreea
Atasu, Kubilay
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Computational Finance
With the widespread digitization of finance and the increasing popularity of cryptocurrencies, the sophistication of fraud schemes devised by cybercriminals is growing. Money laundering -- the movement of illicit funds to conceal their origins -- can cross bank and national boundaries, producing complex transaction patterns. The UN estimates 2-5\% of global GDP or \$0.8 - \$2.0 trillion dollars are laundered globally each year. Unfortunately, real data to train machine learning models to detect laundering is generally not available, and previous synthetic data generators have had significant shortcomings. A realistic, standardized, publicly-available benchmark is needed for comparing models and for the advancement of the area. To this end, this paper contributes a synthetic financial transaction dataset generator and a set of synthetically generated AML (Anti-Money Laundering) datasets. We have calibrated this agent-based generator to match real transactions as closely as possible and made the datasets public. We describe the generator in detail and demonstrate how the datasets generated can help compare different machine learning models in terms of their AML abilities. In a key way, using synthetic data in these comparisons can be even better than using real data: the ground truth labels are complete, whilst many laundering transactions in real data are never detected.
title Realistic Synthetic Financial Transactions for Anti-Money Laundering Models
topic Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Computational Finance
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.16424