Ocado improves fraud detection with machine learning

Ocado Technology is fighting fraud with machine learning, improving its detection rate by 15 times since using automation to detect wrongdoing. The technology division of the online supermarket has built its own machine learning-based algorithm with Google's TensorFlow and Google Cloud to help it detect fraud among the sheer petabytes of data it stores in Google Cloud. The system is part of the Ocado Smart Platform (OSP), and attempts to differentiate between shoppers who accidentally input the wrong personal details or who use an expired debit card, and those who have a malicious intent. For Ocado, part of the danger of fraud is that leaving it unchecked could result in the fraudulent information being moved to other systems and divisions in the business, eventually impacting customer service. This has led Ocado to develop a mechanism for predicting and recognising these incidents among millions of other normal events using data collected from past orders, as well as cases of fraud.