Intelligent Fraud Detection in Financial Statements Using Machine Learning and Data Mining: A Systematic Literature Review

Fraudulent financial statements (FFS) are the results of manipulating financial elements by overvaluing incomes, assets, sales, and profits while underrating expenses, debts, or losses. To identify such fraudulent statements, traditional methods, including manual auditing and inspections, are costly...

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Main Authors: Matin N. Ashtiani, Bijan Raahemi
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2022-01-01
Series:IEEE Access
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9481913/
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author Matin N. Ashtiani
Bijan Raahemi
author_facet Matin N. Ashtiani
Bijan Raahemi
author_sort Matin N. Ashtiani
collection DOAJ
description Fraudulent financial statements (FFS) are the results of manipulating financial elements by overvaluing incomes, assets, sales, and profits while underrating expenses, debts, or losses. To identify such fraudulent statements, traditional methods, including manual auditing and inspections, are costly, imprecise, and time-consuming. Intelligent methods can significantly help auditors in analyzing a large number of financial statements. In this study, we systematically review and synthesize the existing literature on intelligent fraud detection in corporate financial statements. In particular, the focus of this review is on exploring machine learning and data mining methods, as well as the various datasets that are studied for detecting financial fraud. We adopted the Kitchenham methodology as a well-defined protocol to extract, synthesize, and report the results. Accordingly, 47 articles were selected, synthesized, and analyzed. We present the key issues, gaps, and limitations in the area of fraud detection in financial statements and suggest areas for future research. Since supervised algorithms were employed more than unsupervised approaches like clustering, the future research should focus on unsupervised, semi-supervised, as well as bio-inspired and evolutionary heuristic methods for anomaly (fraud) detection. In terms of datasets, it is envisaged that future research making use of textual and audio data. While imposing new challenges, this unstructured data deserves further study as it can show interesting results for intelligent fraud detection.
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spelling doaj.art-bb296aed0297456b8e2db030f7f0db632022-12-22T03:42:50ZengIEEEIEEE Access2169-35362022-01-0110725047252510.1109/ACCESS.2021.30967999481913Intelligent Fraud Detection in Financial Statements Using Machine Learning and Data Mining: A Systematic Literature ReviewMatin N. Ashtiani0https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1254-1141Bijan Raahemi1Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Laboratory, Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, CanadaKnowledge Discovery and Data Mining Laboratory, Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, CanadaFraudulent financial statements (FFS) are the results of manipulating financial elements by overvaluing incomes, assets, sales, and profits while underrating expenses, debts, or losses. To identify such fraudulent statements, traditional methods, including manual auditing and inspections, are costly, imprecise, and time-consuming. Intelligent methods can significantly help auditors in analyzing a large number of financial statements. In this study, we systematically review and synthesize the existing literature on intelligent fraud detection in corporate financial statements. In particular, the focus of this review is on exploring machine learning and data mining methods, as well as the various datasets that are studied for detecting financial fraud. We adopted the Kitchenham methodology as a well-defined protocol to extract, synthesize, and report the results. Accordingly, 47 articles were selected, synthesized, and analyzed. We present the key issues, gaps, and limitations in the area of fraud detection in financial statements and suggest areas for future research. Since supervised algorithms were employed more than unsupervised approaches like clustering, the future research should focus on unsupervised, semi-supervised, as well as bio-inspired and evolutionary heuristic methods for anomaly (fraud) detection. In terms of datasets, it is envisaged that future research making use of textual and audio data. While imposing new challenges, this unstructured data deserves further study as it can show interesting results for intelligent fraud detection.https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9481913/Fraud detectionfinancial statementmachine learningdata miningoutlier detectionsystematic literature review
spellingShingle Matin N. Ashtiani
Bijan Raahemi
Intelligent Fraud Detection in Financial Statements Using Machine Learning and Data Mining: A Systematic Literature Review
IEEE Access
Fraud detection
financial statement
machine learning
data mining
outlier detection
systematic literature review
title Intelligent Fraud Detection in Financial Statements Using Machine Learning and Data Mining: A Systematic Literature Review
title_full Intelligent Fraud Detection in Financial Statements Using Machine Learning and Data Mining: A Systematic Literature Review
title_fullStr Intelligent Fraud Detection in Financial Statements Using Machine Learning and Data Mining: A Systematic Literature Review
title_full_unstemmed Intelligent Fraud Detection in Financial Statements Using Machine Learning and Data Mining: A Systematic Literature Review
title_short Intelligent Fraud Detection in Financial Statements Using Machine Learning and Data Mining: A Systematic Literature Review
title_sort intelligent fraud detection in financial statements using machine learning and data mining a systematic literature review
topic Fraud detection
financial statement
machine learning
data mining
outlier detection
systematic literature review
url https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9481913/
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AT bijanraahemi intelligentfrauddetectioninfinancialstatementsusingmachinelearninganddataminingasystematicliteraturereview