Beyond Homophily: Robust Graph Anomaly Detection via Neural Sparsification

Beyond Homophily: Robust Graph Anomaly Detection via Neural Sparsification

Zheng Gong, Guifeng Wang, Ying Sun, Qi Liu, Yuting Ning, Hui Xiong, Jingyu Peng

Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 2104-2113. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2023/234

Recently, graph-based anomaly detection (GAD) has attracted rising attention due to its effectiveness in identifying anomalies in relational and structured data. Unfortunately, the performance of most existing GAD methods suffers from the inherent structural noises of graphs induced by hidden anomalies connected with considerable benign nodes. In this work, we propose SparseGAD, a novel GAD framework that sparsifies the structures of target graphs to effectively reduce noises and collaboratively learns node representations. It then robustly detects anomalies by uncovering the underlying dependency among node pairs in terms of homophily and heterophily, two essential connection properties of GAD. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets of GAD demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves significantly better detection quality compared with the state-of-the-art methods, even when the graph is heavily attacked. Code will be available at https://github.com/KellyGong/SparseGAD.git.
Keywords:
Data Mining: DM: Applications
Data Mining: DM: Anomaly/outlier detection
Data Mining: DM: Mining graphs