FiD-QAE: A Fidelity-Driven Quantum Autoencoder for Credit Card Fraud Detection

Abstract: Credit card fraud detection is a critical task in financial security, as fraudulent transactions are rare, highly imbalanced, and often resemble legitimate ones. A wide range of classical machine learning methods, as well as more recent quantum machine learning approaches, have been investigated to address this challenge, each providing valuable progress but also leaving open questions regarding scalability, robustness, and adaptability to evolving fraud patterns. In this work, we introduce the Fidelity-based Quantum Autoencoder (FiD-QAE), a quantum architecture that employs fidelity estimation as the decision criterion for anomaly detection. Transactions are encoded into quantum states, compressed through a variational quantum circuit, and evaluated using the SWAP test to distinguish legitimate from fraudulent transactions. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of FiD-QAE, including statistical analyses, multiple performance metrics, and robustness tests under quantum noise models. The results show that FiD-QAE maintains consistent performance across different imbalance levels and preserves robustness in noisy conditions. Moreover, validation on IBM Quantum hardware backends confirms the feasibility of our approach on real devices, with outcomes consistent with simulation. These findings position quantum fidelity as a powerful criterion for anomaly detection and highlight FiD-QAE as a promising direction that complements existing classical and quantum approaches, offering robustness and generalizability for financial fraud detection in realistic environments.