H-VGRAE: A Hierarchical Stochastic Spatial-Temporal Embedding Method for Robust Anomaly Detection in Dynamic Networks

TL;DR

H-VGRAE is a novel hierarchical stochastic neural network that learns robust spatial-temporal embeddings for dynamic networks, significantly improving anomaly detection accuracy and interpretability over existing deterministic methods.

Contribution

The paper introduces H-VGRAE, a semi-supervised variational autoencoder that models stochastic node representations, capturing multi-scale features for robust anomaly detection in dynamic networks.

Findings

H-VGRAE outperforms state-of-the-art methods on four real-world datasets.

The model effectively locates and interprets anomalies from a probabilistic perspective.

H-VGRAE scales well with increasing network size and complexity.

Abstract

Detecting anomalous edges and nodes in dynamic networks is critical in various areas, such as social media, computer networks, and so on. Recent approaches leverage network embedding technique to learn how to generate node representations for normal training samples and detect anomalies deviated from normal patterns. However, most existing network embedding approaches learn deterministic node representations, which are sensitive to fluctuations of the topology and attributes due to the high flexibility and stochasticity of dynamic networks. In this paper, a stochastic neural network, named by Hierarchical Variational Graph Recurrent Autoencoder (H-VGRAE), is proposed to detect anomalies in dynamic networks by the learned robust node representations in the form of random variables. H-VGRAE is a semi-supervised model to capture normal patterns in training set by maximizing the likelihood of the adjacency matrix and node attributes via variational inference. Comparing with existing methods, H-VGRAE has three main advantages: 1) H-VGRAE learns robust node representations through stochasticity modeling and the extraction of multi-scale spatial-temporal features; 2) H-VGRAE can be extended to deep structure with the increase of the dynamic network scale; 3) the anomalous edge and node can be located and interpreted from the probabilistic perspective. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate the outperformance of H-VGRAE on anomaly detection in dynamic networks compared with state-of-the-art competitors.