Machine Learning/Bank Fraud Detection

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There are many applications for machine learning and binary classification, and one of these is the detection of illegitimate transactions on ATMs at banks.


  • True positive: The action was fraudulent, and the algorithm correctly identified the action as such.
  • False positive: The action was not fraudulent, yet the algorithm wrongly identified the action as such. (An innocent user was wrongly denied the service.)
  • True negative: The action was not fraudulent, and the algorithm correctly identified the action as being legitimate.
  • False negative: The action was a fraud, but the algorithm misclassified the action as legitimate. (A bad-faith user was wrongly granted the service.)


The recall is defined as number of true positives divided by the total number of true positives plus false negatives.