Network Analytics for Anti-Money Laundering -- A Systematic Literature Review and Experimental Evaluation

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Main Authors: Deprez, Bruno, Vanderschueren, Toon, Baesens, Bart, Verdonck, Tim, Verbeke, Wouter
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Deprez, Bruno
Vanderschueren, Toon
Baesens, Bart
Verdonck, Tim
Verbeke, Wouter
author_facet Deprez, Bruno
Vanderschueren, Toon
Baesens, Bart
Verdonck, Tim
Verbeke, Wouter
contents Money laundering presents a pervasive challenge, burdening society by financing illegal activities. The use of network information is increasingly being explored to effectively combat money laundering, given it involves connected parties. This led to a surge in research on network analytics for anti-money laundering (AML). The literature is, however, fragmented and a comprehensive overview of existing work is missing. This results in limited understanding of the methods to apply and their comparative detection power. This paper presents an extensive and unique literature review, based on 97 papers from Web of Science and Scopus, resulting in a taxonomy following a recently proposed fraud analytics framework. We conclude that most research relies on expert-based rules and manual features, while deep learning methods have been gaining traction. This paper also presents a comprehensive framework to evaluate and compare the performance of prominent methods in a standardized setup. We compare manual feature engineering, random walk-based, and deep learning methods on two publicly available data sets. We conclude that (1) network analytics increases the predictive power, but caution is needed when applying GNNs in the face of class imbalance and network topology, and that (2) care should be taken with synthetic data as this can give overly optimistic results. The open-source implementation facilitates researchers and practitioners to extend this work on proprietary data, promoting a standardised approach for the analysis and evaluation of network analytics for AML.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_19383
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Network Analytics for Anti-Money Laundering -- A Systematic Literature Review and Experimental Evaluation
Deprez, Bruno
Vanderschueren, Toon
Baesens, Bart
Verdonck, Tim
Verbeke, Wouter
Social and Information Networks
Machine Learning
Money laundering presents a pervasive challenge, burdening society by financing illegal activities. The use of network information is increasingly being explored to effectively combat money laundering, given it involves connected parties. This led to a surge in research on network analytics for anti-money laundering (AML). The literature is, however, fragmented and a comprehensive overview of existing work is missing. This results in limited understanding of the methods to apply and their comparative detection power. This paper presents an extensive and unique literature review, based on 97 papers from Web of Science and Scopus, resulting in a taxonomy following a recently proposed fraud analytics framework. We conclude that most research relies on expert-based rules and manual features, while deep learning methods have been gaining traction. This paper also presents a comprehensive framework to evaluate and compare the performance of prominent methods in a standardized setup. We compare manual feature engineering, random walk-based, and deep learning methods on two publicly available data sets. We conclude that (1) network analytics increases the predictive power, but caution is needed when applying GNNs in the face of class imbalance and network topology, and that (2) care should be taken with synthetic data as this can give overly optimistic results. The open-source implementation facilitates researchers and practitioners to extend this work on proprietary data, promoting a standardised approach for the analysis and evaluation of network analytics for AML.
title Network Analytics for Anti-Money Laundering -- A Systematic Literature Review and Experimental Evaluation
topic Social and Information Networks
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.19383