X-SHAoLIM: Novel Feature Selection Framework for Credit Card Fraud Detection

Fraud in financial data is a significant concern for both businesses and individuals. Credit card transactions involve numerous features, some of which may lack relevance for classifiers and could lead to overfitting. A pivotal step in the fraud detection process is feature selection, which profoundly impacts model accuracy and execution time. In this paper, we introduce an ensemble-based, explainable feature selection framework founded on SHAP and LIME algorithms, called "X-SHAoLIM". We applied our framework to diverse combinations of the best models from previous studies, conducting both quantitative and qualitative comparisons with other feature selection methods. The quantitative evaluation of the "X-SHAoLIM" framework across various model combinations revealed consistent accuracy improvements on average, including increases in Precision (+5.6), Recall (+1.5), F1-Score (+3.5), and AUC-PR (+6.75). Beyond enhanced accuracy, our proposed framework, leveraging explainable algorithms like SHAP and LIME, provides a deeper understanding of features' importance in model predictions, delivering effective explanations to system users.