Subset Node Anomaly Tracking over Large Dynamic Graphs

Abstract: Tracking a targeted subset of nodes in an evolving graph is important for many real-world applications. Existing methods typically focus on identifying anomalous edges or finding anomaly graph snapshots in a stream way. However, edge-oriented methods cannot quantify how individual nodes change over time while others need to maintain representations of the whole graph all time, thus computationally inefficient. This paper proposes \textsc{DynAnom}, an efficient framework to quantify the changes and localize per-node anomalies over large dynamic weighted-graphs. Thanks to recent advances in dynamic representation learning based on Personalized PageRank, \textsc{DynAnom} is 1) \textit{efficient}: the time complexity is linear to the number of edge events and independent on node size of the input graph; 2) \textit{effective}: \textsc{DynAnom} can successfully track topological changes reflecting real-world anomaly; 3) \textit{flexible}: different type of anomaly score functions can be defined for various applications. Experiments demonstrate these properties on both benchmark graph datasets and a new large real-world dynamic graph. Specifically, an instantiation method based on \textsc{DynAnom} achieves the accuracy of 0.5425 compared with 0.2790, the best baseline, on the task of node-level anomaly localization while running 2.3 times faster than the baseline. We present a real-world case study and further demonstrate the usability of \textsc{DynAnom} for anomaly discovery over large-scale graphs.