Why did the shape of your network change? (On detecting network anomalies via non-local curvatures)

Abstract: $Anomaly$ $detection$ problems (also called $change$-$point$ $detection$ problems) have been studied in data mining, statistics and computer science over the last several decades in applications such as medical condition monitoring and weather change detection. In recent days, however, anomaly detection problems have become increasing more relevant in the context of $network$ $science$ since useful insights for many complex systems in biology, finance and social science are often obtained by representing them via networks. Notions of local and non-local curvatures of higher-dimensional geometric shapes and topological spaces play a $fundamental$ role in physics and mathematics in characterizing anomalous behaviours of these higher dimensional entities. However, using curvature measures to detect anomalies in networks is not yet very common. To this end, a main goal in this paper to formulate and analyze curvature analysis methods to provide the foundations of systematic approaches to find $critical$ $components$ and $detect$ $anomalies$ in networks. For this purpose, we use two measures of network curvatures which depend on non-trivial global properties, such as distributions of geodesics and higher-order correlations among nodes, of the given network. Based on these measures, we precisely formulate several computational problems related to anomaly detection in static or dynamic networks, and provide non-trivial computational complexity results for these problems. This paper must $not$ be viewed as delivering the final word on appropriateness and suitability of specific curvature measures. Instead, it is our hope that this paper will stimulate and motivate further theoretical or empirical research concerning the exciting interplay between notions of curvatures from network and non-network domains, a $much$ desired goal in our opinion.