Identifying local useful information for attribute graph anomaly detection

Graph anomaly detection primarily relies on shallow learning methods based on feature engineering and deep learning strategies centred on autoencoder-based reconstruction. However, these methods frequently fail to harness the local attributes and structural information within graph data, making it challenging to capture the underlying distribution in scenarios with class-imbalanced graph anomalies, which can result in overfitting. To deal with the above issue, this paper proposes a new anomaly detection method called LIAD (Identifying Local Useful Information for Attribute Graph Anomaly Detection), which learns the data’s underlying distribution and captures richer local information. First, LIAD employs data augmentation techniques to create masked graphs and pairs of positive and negative subgraphs. Then, LIAD leverages contrastive learning to derive rich embedding representations from diverse local structural information. Additionally, LIAD utilizes a variational autoencoder (VAE) to generate new graph data, capturing the neighbourhood distribution within the masked graph. During the training process, LIAD aligns the generated graph data with the original to deepen its comprehension of local information. Finally, anomaly scoring is achieved by comparing the discrimination and reconstruction scores of the contrastive pairs, enabling effective anomaly detection. Extensive experiments on five real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of LIAD compared to state-of-the-art methods. Comprehensive ablation studies and parametric analyses further affirm the robustness and efficacy of our model.