Why to choose AUC over accuracy? I am working on a fraud detection algorithm using a banking dataset which has large number of transactions. The number of true fraud cases are very small (<1%). So accuracy is not a good measure as if we say there is no fraud at all, we will still have over 99% accuracy. 
I learnt that AUC can be a good measure in such cases but I don't understand why. Can someone explain why?
 A: Neither "classification" accuracy nor the $c$-index (concordance probability; AUROC) are proper accuracy scoring rules.  "Accuracy" should be avoided at all costs, but the concordance probability is still a useful measure of pure predictive discrimination (separation of fraud and non-fraud on the basis of predicted probability of fraud).  Concordance is the probability that of two chosen observations, one fraud and one non-fraud, the fraud is the one with a higher predicted probability.  You can see how this will work fine even with extreme imbalance.
There are other measures to use that are more sensitive and statistically efficient.  See for example http://fharrell.com/post/addvalue .
A: Accuracy is a legitimate validation metric when you are working with a balanced dataset. However, it is often the case, in classification problems, that there is a clearly majority-class. Also, errors are rarelly symetrical (for instance, in medicine, false positives and false negatives are not the same) For what I see in your question, you are already familiar with this concept.
On the other hand, AUC (I'd rather see the entire ROC curve, though) gives you an idea of how the true positive/true negative trade-off works. With this I mean that models with high AUC can detect a large amount of true positives without losing its ability to detect true negatives and vice-versa.
You may also be interested in the precision-recall curve
