Customs Import Declaration Datasets

TL;DR

This paper introduces a synthetic import declaration dataset generated with GANs to support research in trade risk management, enabling safe data sharing and benchmarking for fraud detection.

Contribution

The paper presents a new synthetic dataset for customs import declarations, facilitating research and benchmarking without compromising sensitive trade data.

Findings

Synthetic data closely mimics real trade data distribution

Baseline codes for fraud detection are provided

Advanced algorithms outperform simpler models in fraud detection

Abstract

Given the huge volume of cross-border flows, effective and efficient control of trade becomes more crucial in protecting people and society from illicit trade. However, limited accessibility of the transaction-level trade datasets hinders the progress of open research, and lots of customs administrations have not benefited from the recent progress in data-based risk management. In this paper, we introduce an import declaration dataset to facilitate the collaboration between domain experts in customs administrations and researchers from diverse domains, such as data science and machine learning. The dataset contains 54,000 artificially generated trades with 22 key attributes, and it is synthesized with conditional tabular GAN while maintaining correlated features. Synthetic data has several advantages. First, releasing the dataset is free from restrictions that do not allow disclosing the original import data. The fabrication step minimizes the possible identity risk which may exist in trade statistics. Second, the published data follow a similar distribution to the source data so that it can be used in various downstream tasks. Hence, our dataset can be used as a benchmark for testing the performance of any classification algorithm. With the provision of data and its generation process, we open baseline codes for fraud detection tasks, as we empirically show that more advanced algorithms can better detect fraud.