支付欺诈检测难在系统性信息缺陷,而非模型不够强。
The Fundamental Limits of Fraud Detection in Card Payment Networks
- 将授权过程建模为延迟、缺失、被污染的序列决策问题
- 证明学习速率受信息缺陷影响呈指数级下降
- 建议优先改善报告质量与争议处理,而非盲目提升模型复杂度
信用卡支付欺诈检测通常被视为监督分类问题。尽管模型架构进步显著,但性能提升仍缓慢。我们认为这并非函数逼近或优化能力不足所致,而是支付生态中固有的结构性信息缺陷导致。我们将卡片授权形式化为具有延迟、截断、污染及反事实缺失反馈的序列决策问题,并推导出极小最大遗憾下界,表明这些缺陷以乘积形式出现在可实现学习速率的分母中。该下界表明,提升发卡机构报告质量或减少截断,比增加模型复杂度更能显著降低遗憾下限。此外,发卡机构间异质性带来的影响超过平均缺陷率所反映的程度。本文首次从理论上揭示支付网络欺诈检测本质上比标准在线学习更困难,指出生态系统信息质量是核心瓶颈,并为投资报告基础设施、争议处理与选择性探索提供理论依据。研究为理论导向,不依赖专有交易数据。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Card payment fraud detection is usually framed as a supervised classification problem. Although this approach has generated practical progress, improvement has remained incremental despite major advances in model architecture. We argue that this is not mainly a failure of function approximation or optimization, but a consequence of structural information impairments inherent to the payment ecosystem. We formalize card authorization as a sequential decision problem with delayed, censored, corrupted, and counterfactually missing feedback. We derive a minimax regret lower bound showing that these impairments enter multiplicatively in the denominator of the achievable learning rate. The bound implies that improving issuer reporting quality or reducing censorship can yield larger reductions in the regret floor than increasing model complexity. We also show that heterogeneity across issuers worsens learnability beyond what average impairment rates suggest. The paper contributes a theory of why fraud detection in payment networks is fundamentally harder than in standard online learning settings, identifies ecosystem information quality as the key bottleneck, and provides a theoretical basis for prioritizing investments in reporting infrastructure, dispute process quality, and selective exploration. The paper is theory-first and does not rely on proprietary transaction data.
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