Adversarial random graph neural network for anomaly detection

Anomaly detection is distinguishing unusual objects from normal patterns. It is a complex task due to unpredictable nature of anomalies, which can appear in many forms or they can be hidden by mimicking normal behaviors in a graph structure. Such diversity makes this Deep learning approaches can solve these problems by extracting complex patterns from networks. However, addressing different forms of anomalous instances is essential for successfully implementing these approaches, as different anomaly types require further analysis. Additionally, it is challenging to interpret anomalies beforehand without focusing on every aspect of anomalies. Our objective is to propose an architecture capable of handling all types of anomalous entities by tackling challenges across various domains. In this paper, we introduce ARNAD, a novel framework that integrates three deep models to identify anomalies in graphs: graph neural network, autoencoder, and adversarial autoencoder. ARNAD approaches graph anomaly detection by utilizing the features of the deep parts, and four key elements stand out: (1) the autoencoder learns the overall graph structure and identifies highly deviated ones, (2) the graph neural network exploits graph structure to detect anomalies among the communities, (3) a fixed-size randomized neighborhood that prevents overfitting while reducing complexity (4) the adversarial autoencoder improves the robustness of the framework and discriminates anomalies. To detect anomalies, four receptive components assign risk scores to objects in the attributed network. We evaluated the framework with three synthetic datasets that simulate different behaviors of anomalies and six widely used real attributed networks. Our experimental results show that ARNAD performs competitively with other state-of-the-art models in detecting anomalous entities while minimizing false positives, demonstrating ARNAD's effectiveness in detecting graph anomalies.