ERP-RiskBench: Leakage-Safe Ensemble Learning for Financial Risk

TL;DR

This paper introduces ERP-RiskBench, a comprehensive ensemble learning framework for detecting financial risks in ERP systems, emphasizing leakage prevention, reproducibility, and interpretability.

Contribution

It develops a leakage-safe, reproducible experimental framework with a new benchmark dataset and demonstrates the effectiveness of ensemble models in ERP financial risk detection.

Findings

Stacking ensemble outperforms other models in risk detection.

Leakage-safe protocols significantly reduce inflated performance estimates.

Procurement control features, especially three-way matching discrepancies, are highly informative.

Abstract

Financial risk detection in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems is an important but underexplored application of machine learning. Published studies in this area tend to suffer from vague dataset descriptions, leakage-prone pipelines, and evaluation practices that inflate reported performance. This paper presents a rebuilt experimental framework for ERP financial risk detection using ensemble machine learning. The risk definition is hybrid, covering both procurement compliance anomalies and transactional fraud. A composite benchmark called ERP-RiskBench is assembled from public procurement event logs, labeled fraud data, and a new synthetic ERP dataset with rule-injected risk typologies and conditional tabular GAN augmentation. Nested cross-validation with time-aware and group-aware splitting enforces leakage prevention throughout the pipeline. The primary model is a stacking ensemble of gradient boosting methods, tested alongside linear baselines, deep tabular architectures, and an interpretable glassbox alternative. Performance is measured through Matthews Correlation Coefficient, area under the precision-recall curve, and cost-sensitive decision analysis using calibrated probabilities. Across multiple dataset configurations and a structured ablation study, the stacking ensemble achieves the best detection results. Leakage-safe protocols reduce previously inflated accuracy estimates by a notable margin. SHAP-based explanations and feature stability analysis show that procurement control features, especially three-way matching discrepancies, rank as the most informative predictors. The resulting framework provides a reproducible, operationally grounded blueprint for machine learning deployment in ERP audit and governance settings.