Online Multi-horizon Transaction Metric Estimation with Multi-modal Learning in Payment Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multi-modal learning model with a hybrid training scheme for real-time prediction of transaction metrics in payment networks, addressing challenges like concept drift and multi-modality.

Contribution

It presents a novel multi-component model and hybrid training approach tailored for multivariate time series prediction in payment systems, handling domain-specific challenges.

Findings

Effective transaction metric estimation demonstrated in a prototype system.

Improved system monitoring capabilities for payment companies.

Addressed concept drift with hybrid offline/online training scheme.

Abstract

Predicting metrics associated with entities' transnational behavior within payment processing networks is essential for system monitoring. Multivariate time series, aggregated from the past transaction history, can provide valuable insights for such prediction. The general multivariate time series prediction problem has been well studied and applied across several domains, including manufacturing, medical, and entomology. However, new domain-related challenges associated with the data such as concept drift and multi-modality have surfaced in addition to the real-time requirements of handling the payment transaction data at scale. In this work, we study the problem of multivariate time series prediction for estimating transaction metrics associated with entities in the payment transaction database. We propose a model with five unique components to estimate the transaction metrics from multi-modality data. Four of these components capture interaction, temporal, scale, and shape perspectives, and the fifth component fuses these perspectives together. We also propose a hybrid offline/online training scheme to address concept drift in the data and fulfill the real-time requirements. Combining the estimation model with a graphical user interface, the prototype transaction metric estimation system has demonstrated its potential benefit as a tool for improving a payment processing company's system monitoring capability.