Detecting SIM box fraud by using support vector machine and artificial neural network

Abstract

Fraud in communication has been increasing dramatically due to the new modern technologies and the global superhighways of communication, resulting in loss of revenues and quality of service in telecommunication providers especially in Africa and Asia. One of the dominant types of fraud is SIM box bypass fraud whereby SIM cards are used to channel national and multinational calls away from mobile operators and deliver as local calls. Therefore it is important to find techniques that can detect this type of fraud efficiently. In this paper, two classification techniques, Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) were developed to detect this type of fraud. The classification uses nine selected features of data extracted from Customer Database Record. The performance of ANN is compared with SVM to find which model gives the best performance. From the experiments, it is found that SVM model gives higher accuracy compared to ANN by giving the classification accuracy of 99.06% compared with ANN model, 98.71% accuracy. Besides, better accuracy performance, SVM also requires less computational time compared to ANN since it takes lesser amount of time in model building and training.