Fraudsters increasingly exploit unauthorized credit card information for financial gain, targeting un-suspecting users, especially as financial institutions expand their services to semi-urban and rural areas. This, in turn, has continued to ripple across society, causing huge financial losses and lowering user trust implications for all cardholders. Thus, banks cum financial institutions are today poised to implement fraud detection schemes. Five algorithms were trained with and without the application of the Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE) to assess their performance. These algorithms included Random Forest (RF), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Naïve Bayes (NB), Support Vector Machines (SVM), and Logistic Regression (LR). The methodology was implemented and tested through an API using Flask and Streamlit in Python. Before applying SMOTE, the RF classifier outperformed the others with an accuracy of 0.9802, while the accuracies for LR, KNN, NB, and SVM were 0.9219, 0.9435, 0.9508, and 0.9008, respectively. Conversely, after the application of SMOTE, RF achieved a prediction accuracy of 0.9919, whereas LR, KNN, NB, and SVM attained accuracies of 0.9805, 0.9210, 0.9125, and 0.8145, respectively. These results highlight the effectiveness of combining RF with SMOTE to enhance prediction accuracy in credit card fraud detection.

Besides the inherent benefits of exchanging information and interactions between nodes on a social graph, they can also become a means for the propagation of knowledge. Social graphs have also become a veritable structure for the spread of disease outbreaks. These and its set of protocols are deployed as measures to curb its widespread effects as it has also left network experts puzzled. The recent lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic continue to reiterate that diseases will always be around. Nodal exposure, adoption/diffusion of disease(s) among interacting nodes vis-a-vis migration of nodes that cause further spread of contagion (concerning COVID-19 and other epidemics) has continued to leave experts bewildered towards rejigging set protocols. We model COVID-19 as a Markovian process with node targeting, propagation and recovery using migration-interaction as a threshold feat on a social graph. The migration-interaction design seeks to provision the graph with minimization and block of targeted diffusion of the contagion using seedset(s) nodes with a susceptible-infect policy. The study results showed that migration and interaction of nodes via the mobility approach have become an imperative factor that must be added when modeling the propagation of contagion or epidemics.

The advent of the Internet as an effective means for resource sharing has consequently, led to proliferation of adversaries, with unauthorized access to network resources. Adversaries achieved fraudulent activities via carefully crafted attacks of large magnitude targeted at personal gains and rewards. With the cost of over $1.3Trillion lost globally to financial crimes and the rise in such fraudulent activities vis the use of credit-cards, financial institutions and major stakeholders must begin to explore and exploit better and improved means to secure client data and funds. Banks and financial services must harness the creative mode rendered by machine learning schemes to help effectively manage such fraud attacks and threats. We propose HyGAMoNNE – a hybrid modular genetic algorithm trained neural network ensemble to detect fraud activities. The hybrid, equipped with knowledge to altruistically detect fraud on credit card transactions. Results show that the hybrid effectively differentiates, the benign class attacks/threats from genuine credit card transaction(s) with model accuracy of 92%.