As part of the BACUDA (Band of Customs Data Analysts) project, the World Customs Organisation (WCO) has developed a neural network model called “Dual-Attentive-Tree-aware-Embedded" (DATE) to assist Customs administrations in better detecting fraud-risky transactions.
The WCO BACUDA project was launched in September 2019 as a collaborative research platform focused on data analytics. Nigeria Customs are implementing a pilot test to verify its performance at the Tin Can (in Lagos) and Onne (in Port-Harcourt) seaports. The model uses an Artificial Intelligence (AI) module called “ATTENTION” that can detect potential fraudulent transactions more accurately than the other traditional machine learning models, and using less data (such as XGBoost/eXtreme Gradient Boosting, a machine learning model used by many organisations, like insurances, for identifying fraudulent claims by aggregating and analysing historical data on their clients).