SpecAE: Spectral AutoEncoder for Anomaly Detection in Attributed Networks

Abstract: Anomaly detection aims to distinguish observations that are rare and different from the majority. While most existing algorithms assume that instances are i.i.d., in many practical scenarios, links describing instance-to-instance dependencies and interactions are available. Such systems are called attributed networks. Anomaly detection in attributed networks has various applications such as monitoring suspicious accounts in social media and financial fraud in transaction networks. However, it remains a challenging task since the definition of anomaly becomes more complicated and topological structures are heterogeneous with nodal attributes. In this paper, we propose a spectral convolution and deconvolution based framework -- SpecAE, to project the attributed network into a tailored space to detect global and community anomalies. SpecAE leverages Laplacian sharpening to amplify the distances between representations of anomalies and the ones of the majority. The learned representations along with reconstruction errors are combined with a density estimation model to perform the detection. They are trained jointly as an end-to-end framework. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SpecAE.