Enhanced Graph Autoencoder for Graph Anomaly Detection Using Subgraph Information

Graph anomaly detection aims at identifying rare, unusual entities in attributed networks with respect to their patterns or structures that deviate significantly from the majority within a graph. Over the years, extensive efforts in this field have been dedicated to the powerful capability of attributed networks to model real-world systems. Given the scarcity of labeled anomalies, current research primarily emphasizes model design via unsupervised learning. Graph autoencoders have been widely utilized for such purposes, leveraging the outstanding capabilities of Graph Neural Networks to model graph structured data. However, most existing graph autoencoder-based anomaly detectors do not exploit the nodes’ local subgraph information, limiting their ability to comprehensively understand the network for better representation learning. Moreover, these methods place greater emphasis on the attribute reconstruction process while neglecting the structure reconstruction aspect. This paper proposes an enhanced graph autoencoder framework for graph anomaly detection tasks that incorporates a subgraph extraction and aggregation preprocessing stage to utilize the nodes’ local topological information for enhanced embedding generation and to induce an additional node–subgraph view through model learning. A graph structure learning-based decoder is introduced as the structure decoder for better relationship learning. Finally, during the anomaly scoring stage, a node neighborhood selection technique is applied to enhance the detection performance. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is demonstrated through comprehensive experiments conducted on six commonly used real-world datasets.