FraudGNN-RL: A Graph Neural Network With Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Financial Fraud Detection
Yiwen Cui, Xu Han, Jiaying Chen, Xinguang Zhang, Jingyun Yang, Xuguang Zhang · IEEE Open Journal of the Computer Society · 2025
As financial systems become increasingly complex and interconnected, traditional fraud detection methods struggle to keep pace with sophisticated fraudulent activities. This article introduces FraudGNN-RL, an innovative framework that combines Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) with Reinforcement Learning (RL) for adaptive and context-aware financial fraud detection. Our approach models financial transactions as a dynamic graph, where entities (e.g., users, merchants) are nodes and transactions form edges. We propose a novel GNN architecture, Temporal-Spatial-Semantic Graph Convolution (TSSGC), which simultaneously captures temporal patterns, spatial relationships, and semantic information in transaction data. The RL component, implemented as a Deep Q-Network (DQN), dynamically adjusts the fraud detection threshold and feature importance, allowing the model to adapt to evolving fraud patterns and minimize detection costs. We further introduce a Federated Learning scheme to enable collaborative model training across multiple financial institutions while preserving data privacy. Extensive experiments on a large-scale, real-world financial dataset demonstrate that FraudGNN-RL outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving a 97.3% F1-score and reducing false positives by 31% compared to the best-performing baseline. Our framework also shows remarkable resilience to concept drift and adversarial attacks, maintaining high performance over extended periods. These results suggest that FraudGNN-RL offers a robust, adaptive, and privacy-preserving solution for financial fraud detection in the era of Big Data and interconnected financial ecosystems.