Predicting Suspicious Money Laundering Transactions using Machine Learning Algorithms (preprint)

ABSTRACT

This study employs machine learning techniques to identify key drivers of suspicious activity reporting. The data for this study comes from all suspicious activities reported to the California government in 2018. In total, there were 45,000 records of data that represent various features. The paper uses linear regression along with Lasso, Ridge, and Elastic Net to perform feature regularization and address overfitting with the data. Other probabilistic and non-linear algorithms, namely, support vector machines, random forests, XGBoost, and CatBoost, were used to deal with the complexity of the data. The results from the  mean squared and root mean squared errors indicate that the ensemble tree-based algorithm performed better than the statistical and probabilistic models. The findings revealed that filings from regulators, the type of products, and customers' relationships with the institutions were the top contributors to SAR filings. Through the evaluation of a vast amount of data, this study provides valuable insights for identifying suspicious activities in financial transactions and has the potential to significantly improve suspicious transaction monitoring.