Boosting Anomaly Detection in Financial Transactions: Leveraging Deep Learning with Isolation Forest for Enhanced Accuracy

Anomaly detection in financial transactions is paramount for safeguarding against fraudulent activities that pose significant risks to financial institutions and customers alike. Traditional methods often struggle to accurately identify complex and evolving patterns of fraud, necessitating innovative approaches that leverage advanced techniques such as deep learning and isolation forest. In this study, we propose a novel framework for boosting anomaly detection in financial transactions by integrating deep learning with isolation forest to achieve enhanced accuracy. Firstly, it employ an autoencoder, a type of neural network, to learn complex representations of normal transaction patterns and reconstruct input data. The autoencoder's ability to capture subtle variations in transaction attributes enables it to effectively distinguish between normal and anomalous instances based on the reconstruction error. Furthermore, we augment the anomaly detection process by incorporating isolation forest, a tree-based algorithm that isolates anomalies in the feature space by recursively partitioning data subsets. By combining the representation learning capabilities of deep learning with the outlier detection prowess of isolation forest, our framework offers a comprehensive solution for detecting fraudulent activities in financial transactions. Through experimentation on real-world financial datasets, we demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed framework compared to existing methods. The proposed method is implemented in Python software and has an accuracy of about 99.12% which is 1.49% higher than other existing methods like Conv-LSTM, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-LSTM, and CNN-GRU (Gated Recurrent Unit). Moreover, the integration of deep learning with isolation forest enables our framework to adapt to evolving patterns of fraud, ensuring robust and reliable anomaly detection in dynamic financial environments. Overall, our study contributes to the advancement of anomaly detection techniques in financial transactions, offering a promising solution for mitigating fraud risks and enhancing the security of financial systems.