2SFGL: A Simple And Robust Protocol For Graph-Based Fraud Detection

Abstract: Financial crime detection using graph learning improves financial safety and efficiency. However, criminals may commit financial crimes across different institutions to avoid detection, which increases the difficulty of detection for financial institutions which use local data for graph learning. As most financial institutions are subject to strict regulations in regards to data privacy protection, the training data is often isolated and conventional learning technology cannot handle the problem. Federated learning (FL) allows multiple institutions to train a model without revealing their datasets to each other, hence ensuring data privacy protection. In this paper, we proposes a novel two-stage approach to federated graph learning (2SFGL): The first stage of 2SFGL involves the virtual fusion of multiparty graphs, and the second involves model training and inference on the virtual graph. We evaluate our framework on a conventional fraud detection task based on the FraudAmazonDataset and FraudYelpDataset. Experimental results show that integrating and applying a GCN (Graph Convolutional Network) with our 2SFGL framework to the same task results in a 17.6\%-30.2\% increase in performance on several typical metrics compared to the case only using FedAvg, while integrating GraphSAGE with 2SFGL results in a 6\%-16.2\% increase in performance compared to the case only using FedAvg. We conclude that our proposed framework is a robust and simple protocol which can be simply integrated to pre-existing graph-based fraud detection methods.