Self-Discriminative Modeling for Anomalous Graph Detection
Jinyu Cai Yunhe Zhang Jicong Fan
This paper studies the problem of detecting anomalous graphs using a machine
learning model trained on only normal graphs, which has many applications in
molecule, biology, and social network data analysis. We present a
self-discriminative modeling framework for anomalous graph detection. The key
idea, mathematically and numerically illustrated, is to learn a discriminator
(classifier) from the given normal graphs together with pseudo-anomalous graphs
generated by a model jointly trained, where we never use any true anomalous
graphs and we hope that the generated pseudo-anomalous graphs interpolate
between normal ones and (real) anomalous ones. Under the framework, we provide
three algorithms with different computational efficiencies and stabilities for
anomalous graph detection. The three algorithms are compared with several
state-of-the-art graph-level anomaly detection baselines on nine popular graph
datasets (four with small size and five with moderate size) and show
significant improvement in terms of AUC. The success of our algorithms stems
from the integration of the discriminative classifier and the well-posed
pseudo-anomalous graphs, which provide new insights for anomaly detection.
Moreover, we investigate our algorithms for large-scale imbalanced graph
datasets. Surprisingly, our algorithms, though fully unsupervised, are able to
significantly outperform supervised learning algorithms of anomalous graph
detection. The corresponding reason is also analyzed.