Rethinking Reconstruction-based Graph-Level Anomaly Detection: Limitations and a Simple Remedy

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Kim, Sunwoo, Lee, Soo Yong, Bu, Fanchen, Kang, Shinhwan, Kim, Kyungho, Yoo, Jaemin, Shin, Kijung
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866929562254835712
author Kim, Sunwoo
Lee, Soo Yong
Bu, Fanchen
Kang, Shinhwan
Kim, Kyungho
Yoo, Jaemin
Shin, Kijung
author_facet Kim, Sunwoo
Lee, Soo Yong
Bu, Fanchen
Kang, Shinhwan
Kim, Kyungho
Yoo, Jaemin
Shin, Kijung
contents Graph autoencoders (Graph-AEs) learn representations of given graphs by aiming to accurately reconstruct them. A notable application of Graph-AEs is graph-level anomaly detection (GLAD), whose objective is to identify graphs with anomalous topological structures and/or node features compared to the majority of the graph population. Graph-AEs for GLAD regard a graph with a high mean reconstruction error (i.e. mean of errors from all node pairs and/or nodes) as anomalies. Namely, the methods rest on the assumption that they would better reconstruct graphs with similar characteristics to the majority. We, however, report non-trivial counter-examples, a phenomenon we call reconstruction flip, and highlight the limitations of the existing Graph-AE-based GLAD methods. Specifically, we empirically and theoretically investigate when this assumption holds and when it fails. Through our analyses, we further argue that, while the reconstruction errors for a given graph are effective features for GLAD, leveraging the multifaceted summaries of the reconstruction errors, beyond just mean, can further strengthen the features. Thus, we propose a novel and simple GLAD method, named MUSE. The key innovation of MUSE involves taking multifaceted summaries of reconstruction errors as graph features for GLAD. This surprisingly simple method obtains SOTA performance in GLAD, performing best overall among 14 methods across 10 datasets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_20366
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Rethinking Reconstruction-based Graph-Level Anomaly Detection: Limitations and a Simple Remedy
Kim, Sunwoo
Lee, Soo Yong
Bu, Fanchen
Kang, Shinhwan
Kim, Kyungho
Yoo, Jaemin
Shin, Kijung
Machine Learning
Social and Information Networks
Graph autoencoders (Graph-AEs) learn representations of given graphs by aiming to accurately reconstruct them. A notable application of Graph-AEs is graph-level anomaly detection (GLAD), whose objective is to identify graphs with anomalous topological structures and/or node features compared to the majority of the graph population. Graph-AEs for GLAD regard a graph with a high mean reconstruction error (i.e. mean of errors from all node pairs and/or nodes) as anomalies. Namely, the methods rest on the assumption that they would better reconstruct graphs with similar characteristics to the majority. We, however, report non-trivial counter-examples, a phenomenon we call reconstruction flip, and highlight the limitations of the existing Graph-AE-based GLAD methods. Specifically, we empirically and theoretically investigate when this assumption holds and when it fails. Through our analyses, we further argue that, while the reconstruction errors for a given graph are effective features for GLAD, leveraging the multifaceted summaries of the reconstruction errors, beyond just mean, can further strengthen the features. Thus, we propose a novel and simple GLAD method, named MUSE. The key innovation of MUSE involves taking multifaceted summaries of reconstruction errors as graph features for GLAD. This surprisingly simple method obtains SOTA performance in GLAD, performing best overall among 14 methods across 10 datasets.
title Rethinking Reconstruction-based Graph-Level Anomaly Detection: Limitations and a Simple Remedy
topic Machine Learning
Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.20366