Interpretable vs Learned Encoders for High-Cardinality Fraud Detection
arXiv cs.LG1mo4 min read
arXiv:2607.00477v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A total of seven categorical encoding methods were tested on the IEEE-CIS fraud benchmark dataset (590,540 records, 3.5% positives, 8 high-cardinality columns). The encoders were evaluated using a stratified 5-fold cross-validation (CV) with three repetitions. Five of the encoders had identical frozen LightGBM learners in the downstream phase, allowing for controlled comparisons of their performance to each other. CatBoost and TabNet were included as comparisons across paradigms using different learners. The entity embeddings produced the highest
