A Novel Ensemble Learning-Based Approach for Click Fraud Detection in Mobile Advertising

By diverting funds away from legitimate partners (a.k.a publishers), click fraud represents a serious drain on advertising budgets and can seriously harm the viability of the internet advertising market. As such, fraud detection algorithms which can identify fraudulent behavior based on user click patterns are extremely valuable. Based on the BuzzCity dataset, we propose a novel approach for click fraud detection which is based on a set of new features derived from existing attributes. The proposed model is evaluated in terms of the resulting precision, recall and the area under the ROC curve. A final ensemble model based on 6 different learning algorithms proved to be stable with respect to all 3 performance indicators. Our final model shows improved results on training, validation and test datasets, thus demonstrating its generalizability to different datasets.