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Transaction fraud detection via attentional spatial–temporal GNN

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Abstract

The detection of fraudulent transactions remains a critical challenge in the financial services industry, further intensified by the rapid growth in transaction volumes and the increasingly sophisticated tactics of fraudsters. Traditional methods, including current graph neural networks, have shown potential but often fall short in accurately detecting fraud due to the ability of fraudsters to mimic legitimate behaviors, conceal relationships, and operate within narrow time frames. These limitations necessitate the development of more effective detection techniques. This study is motivated by the need to overcome the inherent limitations of existing GNN-based methods in fraud detection. We propose an innovative approach that enhances local information aggregation and incorporates global insights through graph reconstruction, addressing both the structural and temporal complexities introduced by fraudulent activities. Our method utilizes attention mechanisms to capture spatial–temporal relationships within transaction networks, emphasizing crucial connections between nodes to improve detection efficiency. Key innovations include attentional intra-relation aggregation, which differentiates the strength of connections between neighboring nodes, and attentional inter-relation aggregation, which prioritizes nodes that share a higher number of common neighbors. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed method using two benchmark datasets, YelpChi and Amazon, as well as a real-world dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing techniques, achieving notable improvements in AUC, F1-macro, and Gmean metrics. These results highlight the importance of addressing the current limitations in GNN-based methods and demonstrate the potential of our approach to provide a more robust solution for financial fraud detection.

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No datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study.

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Funding

The authors declare that no funds, grants, or other support were received during the preparation of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran

    Samiyeh Khosravi, Mehrdad Kargari & Babak Teimourpour

  2. Faculty of Management, Imam Sadiq University, Tehran, Iran

    Mohammad Talebi

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Contributions

S. KH. and M. K. contributed to conceptualization of the study and methodology; S. KH. contributed to software and formal analysis; M. K. contributed to data curation and supervision; S. KH., B.T., and M.T. contributed to writing—original draft; B. T. and M. T. contributed to investigation, resources, review, and editing.

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Correspondence to Mehrdad Kargari.

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Khosravi, S., Kargari, M., Teimourpour, B. et al. Transaction fraud detection via attentional spatial–temporal GNN. J Supercomput 81, 537 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-025-06983-8

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