Fine-Grained Anomaly Detection on Dynamic Graphs via Attention Alignment
Dong Chen, Xiang Hui Zhao, Weidong Xiao · 2024
Dynamic graphs are ubiquitous in our lives, yet they are also susceptible to the risks imposed by malicious activities. However, identifying anomalies in these dynamic graphs presents a challenging task due to the complex graph structures. Existing methods for dynamic anomaly detection primarily focus on learning representations for each timestamp and using sequence modeling techniques to capture and model the temporal information. Despite extensive research, dynamic anomaly detection still faces two key challenges. First, existing methods are limited in effectively using fine-grained temporal information. Second, they have limited generalization capabilities under unsupervised settings. Overcoming these challenges is crucial for advances in dynamic anomaly detection. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised anomaly detection method for dynamic graphs. Our approach leverages complex temporal information through fine-grained sampling and embedding modules. Additionally, we introduce an attention alignment strategy to minimize discrepancies in contextual attention between source and target nodes. Through a comprehensive evaluation, we demonstrate that our strategy effectively mitigates overfitting and improves generalization. Experiments on ten dynamic graph datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed method in detecting anomalies.