Anomaly Subgraph Detection with Feature Transfer

Abstract

Anomaly detection in multilayer graphs becomes more critical in many application scenarios, i.e., identifying crime hotspots in urban areas by discovering suspicious and illicit behaviors in social networks. However, it is a big challenge to identify anomalies in a layer graph due to the insufficient anomaly features. Most existing methods of anomaly detection determine whether a node is abnormal by looking at the observable anomalous feature values. However, these methods are not suitable for scenarios in which the abnormal features are scarce, e.g., geometric graphs or non-public data in social network services. In this paper, to detect anomaly in a graph with insufficient anomalous features, we propose a pioneering approach ASD-FT (Anomaly Subgraph Detection with Feature Transfer) based on a strategy of anomalous feature transfers between different layers of a multilayer graph. The proposed ASD-FT detects anomaly subgraphs from the graph of the target layer by analyzing the anomalous features in the graph of another layer. We demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach ASD-FT with extensive experiments on five real-world datasets.