Quantum Computing in Community Detection for Anti-Fraud Applications

Fraud detection within transaction data is crucial for maintaining financial security, especially in the era of big data. This paper introduces a novel fraud detection method that utilizes quantum computing to implement community detection in transaction networks. We model transaction data as an undirected graph, where nodes represent accounts and edges indicate transactions between them. A modularity function is defined to measure the community structure of the graph. By optimizing this function through the Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) model, we identify the optimal community structure, which is then used to assess the fraud risk within each community. Using a Coherent Ising Machine (CIM) to solve the QUBO model, we successfully divide 308 nodes into four communities. We find that the CIM computes faster than the classical Louvain and simulated annealing (SA) algorithms. Moreover, the CIM achieves better community structure than Louvain and SA as quantified by the modularity function. The structure also unambiguously identifies a high-risk community, which contains almost 70% of all the fraudulent accounts, demonstrating the practical utility of the method for banks' anti-fraud business.