Deep graph level anomaly detection with contrastive learning

Publication Name

Scientific Reports

Abstract

Graph level anomaly detection (GLAD) aims to spot anomalous graphs that structure pattern and feature information are different from most normal graphs in a graph set, which is rarely studied by other researchers but has significant application value. For instance, GLAD can be used to distinguish some different characteristic molecules in drug discovery and chemical analysis. However, GLAD mainly faces the following three challenges: (1) learning more comprehensive graph level representations to differ normal graphs and abnormal graphs, (2) designing an effective graph anomaly evaluation paradigm to capture graph anomalies from the local and global graph perspectives, (3) overcoming the number imbalance problem of normal and abnormal graphs. In this paper, we combine graph neural networks and contrastive learning to build an end-to-end GLAD framework for solving the three challenges above. We aim to design a new graph level anomaly evaluation way, which first utilizes the contrastive learning strategy to enhance different level representations of normal graphs from node and graph levels by a graph convolution autoencoder with perturbed graph encoder. Then, we evaluate the error of them with corresponding representations of the generated reconstruction graph to detect anomalous graphs. Extensive experiments on ten real-world datasets from three areas, such as molecular, protein and social network anomaly graphs, show that our model can effectively detect graph level anomaly from the majority and outperform existing advanced methods.

Open Access Status

This publication may be available as open access

Volume

12

Issue

1

Article Number

19867

Funding Number

DE200100964

Funding Sponsor

Australian Research Council

Share

COinS
 

Link to publisher version (DOI)

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-22086-3