FGAD: Self-boosted Knowledge Distillation for An Effective Federated
  Graph Anomaly Detection Framework
Jinyu Cai Yunhe Zhang Zhoumin Lu Wenzhong Guo See-kiong Ng
Graph anomaly detection (GAD) aims to identify anomalous graphs that
significantly deviate from other ones, which has raised growing attention due
to the broad existence and complexity of graph-structured data in many
real-world scenarios. However, existing GAD methods usually execute with
centralized training, which may lead to privacy leakage risk in some sensitive
cases, thereby impeding collaboration among organizations seeking to
collectively develop robust GAD models. Although federated learning offers a
promising solution, the prevalent non-IID problems and high communication costs
present significant challenges, particularly pronounced in collaborations with
graph data distributed among different participants. To tackle these
challenges, we propose an effective federated graph anomaly detection framework
(FGAD). We first introduce an anomaly generator to perturb the normal graphs to
be anomalous, and train a powerful anomaly detector by distinguishing generated
anomalous graphs from normal ones. Then, we leverage a student model to distill
knowledge from the trained anomaly detector (teacher model), which aims to
maintain the personality of local models and alleviate the adverse impact of
non-IID problems. Moreover, we design an effective collaborative learning
mechanism that facilitates the personalization preservation of local models and
significantly reduces communication costs among clients. Empirical results of
the GAD tasks on non-IID graphs compared with state-of-the-art baselines
demonstrate the superiority and efficiency of the proposed FGAD method.