Methods for generating fraud detection rules based on transaction data may include receiving historical transaction data, associating tags with each transaction, generating decision trees having root nodes and child nodes operably connected to the respective root nodes, determining at least one primary rule and at least one set of secondary rules associated with the at least one primary rule based on relationships between features of the transactions, assigning primary rules and sets of secondary rules to the at least one decision tree to populate the tree, extracting a plurality of rule sets including at least one primary rule and one or more secondary rules, determining an ordering of the plurality of rule sets; and determining a subset of rule sets from the ordered plurality of rule sets against which subsequently received transactions are compared against to determine if the subsequent transactions are fraudulent.