Automobile insurance fraud detection in the age of big data – a systematic and comprehensive literature review

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to survey the automobile insurance fraud detection literature in the past 31 years (1990–2021) and present a research agenda that addresses the challenges and opportunities artificial intelligence and machine learning bring to car insurance fraud detection. Design/methodology/approach Content analysis methodology is used to analyze 46 peer-reviewed academic papers from 31 journals plus eight conference proceedings to identify their research themes and detect trends and changes in the automobile insurance fraud detection literature according to content characteristics. Findings This study found that automobile insurance fraud detection is going through a transformation, where traditional statistics-based detection methods are replaced by data mining- and artificial intelligence-based approaches. In this study, it was also noticed that cost-sensitive and hybrid approaches are the up-and-coming avenues for further research. Practical implications This paper’s findings not only highlight the rise and benefits of data mining- and artificial intelligence-based automobile insurance fraud detection but also highlight the deficiencies observable in this field such as the lack of cost-sensitive approaches or the absence of reliable data sets. Originality/value This paper offers greater insight into how artificial intelligence and data mining challenges traditional automobile insurance fraud detection models and addresses the need to develop new cost-sensitive fraud detection methods that identify new real-world data sets.