DeGAN - Decomposition-based unified anomaly detection in static networks

• Published in: Information sciences 2024-08, Vol.677, Article 120886
• Main Authors: Tüzen, Ahmet, Yaslan, Yusuf
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adversarial autoencoder; Graph anomaly detection; Graph decomposition; Graph neural networks
• ISSN: 0020-0255; 1872-6291
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ins.2024.120886

Graph anomaly detection aims to identify anomalous occurrences in networks. However, this is more challenging than the traditional anomaly detection problem because anomalies in graphs can manifest in three different forms: anomalous nodes, anomalous edges, and anomalous sub-graphs. It is crucial to detect all these anomaly types within a single framework to provide a unified solution to the graph anomaly detection task. The main objective of this study is to propose a model that is capable of detecting all static graph anomalies in a single architecture across various domains. In this paper, we introduce DeGAN (Decomposition-based unified Graph ANomaly detection), a novel framework for unified graph anomaly detection in static networks. DeGAN combines two deep learning concepts with graph decomposition to identify anomalous graph objects: a graph neural network and an adversarial autoencoder. DeGAN is featured with its capability to detect anomalies in a single process, and adopting graph decomposition has improved performance compared to the traditional adversarial learning approach. DeGAN is evaluated with six real-world datasets to demonstrate that our framework can work in multiple domains. Experimental results demonstrate that DeGAN is capable of detecting anomalous nodes, edges, and sub-graphs within a single model. Additionally, the effectiveness of the sub-components of DeGAN has been demonstrated through experimentation. Even though DeGAN is proposed for plain graphs, it can be extended to attributed and dynamic graphs.