Machine Learning for Fraud Detection in Streaming Services

Streaming services serve content to millions of users all over the world. These services allow users to stream or download content across a broad category of devices including mobile phones, laptops, and televisions. However, some restrictions are in place, such as the number of active devices, the number of streams, and the number of downloaded titles. Many users across many platforms make for a uniquely large attack surface that includes content fraud, account fraud, and abuse of terms of service. Detection of fraud and abuse at scale and in real-time is highly challenging. Data analysis and machine learning techniques are great candidates to help secure large-scale streaming platforms. Even though such techniques can scale security solutions proportional to the service size, they bring their own set of challenges such as requiring labeled data samples, defining effective features, and finding appropriate algorithms. In this work, by relying on the knowledge and experience of streaming security experts, we define features based on the expected streaming behavior of the users and their interactions with devices. We present a systematic overview of the unexpected streaming behaviors together with a set of model-based and data-driven anomaly detection strategies to identify them. <h1>Background on Anomaly Detection</h1> Anomalies (also known as outliers) are defined as certain patterns (or incidents) in a set of data samples that do not conform to an agreed-upon notion of normal behavior in a given context. There are two main anomaly detection approaches, namely, (i) rule-based, and (ii) model-based. Rule-based anomaly detection approaches use a set of rules which rely on the knowledge and experience of domain experts. Domain experts specify the characteristics of anomalous incidents in a given context and develop a set of rule-based functions to discover the anomalous incidents. As a result of this reliance, the deployment and use of rule-based anomaly detection methods become prohibitively expensive and time-consuming at scale, and cannot be used for real-time analyses. Furthermore, the rule-based anomaly detection approaches require constant supervision by experts in order to keep the underlying set of rules up-to-date for identifying novel threats. Reliance on experts can also make rule-based approaches biased or limited in scope and efficacy. <a href="https://netflixtechblog.com/machine-learning-for-fraud-detection-in-streaming-services-b0b4ef3be3f6">Visit Now</a>