Unsupervised Detection of Fraudulent Transactions in E-commerce Using Contrastive Learning

Abstract

With the rapid development of e-commerce, e-commerce platforms are facing an increasing number of fraud threats. Effectively identifying and preventing these fraudulent activities has become a critical research problem. Traditional fraud detection methods typically rely on supervised learning, which requires large amounts of labeled data. However, such data is often difficult to obtain, and the continuous evolution of fraudulent activities further reduces the adaptability and effectiveness of traditional methods. To address this issue, this study proposes an unsupervised e-commerce fraud detection algorithm based on SimCLR. The algorithm leverages the contrastive learning framework to effectively detect fraud by learning the underlying representations of transaction data in an unlabeled setting. Experimental results on the eBay platform dataset show that the proposed algorithm outperforms traditional unsupervised methods such as K-means, Isolation Forest, and Autoencoders in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score, demonstrating strong fraud detection capabilities. The results confirm that the SimCLR-based unsupervised fraud detection method has broad application prospects in e-commerce platform security, improving both detection accuracy and robustness. In the future, with the increasing scale and diversity of datasets, the model's performance will continue to improve, and it could be integrated with real-time monitoring systems to provide more efficient security for e-commerce platforms.