As the demand for insurance continues to skyrocket in our daily lives, accurately predicting claim amount has become a critical demand for insurance companies. This capacity enables to identify high-risk individuals for minimizing substantial claims and, conversely, help to lower premiums for other policyholders. Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved remarkable performance on classification and recommendation for insurance, but have not been extended to this regression task. Will GNNs serve as a powerful tool for claim amount prediction? Surprisingly, our research reveals that GNNs perform well in this area, but encounter three challenges, i.e., the mixture of heterophilic and homophilous network pattern, label scarcity and label uncertainty. To address these challenges, we propose Decoupled Graph Neural Networks Enhanced by Pseudo Labels for Claim Prediction (GClaim) to empower existing GNNs for claim amount prediction. Specifically, GClaim automatically organizing nodes into distinct clusters, facilitating the independent learning of nodes within each latent network pattern. It further introduces trustworthy pseudo labels from unlabeled and uncertain nodes through a standard deviation-induced filtering strategy. Extensive experiments on three industrial datasets and five newly developed proxy public datasets with varying evaluation protocols demonstrate the effectiveness of GClaim, as well as each well-designed component in GClaim. In light of its outstanding performance, GClaim has been successfully deployed in the online auto-insurance platform of Alipay. With GClaim, the auto-insurance service has experienced an over 10% increase in the end-to-end conversion rate and over 25% rise in UV value.

Graph-based methods have proven effective in financial fraud detection by modeling relationships between entities, yet they often fail to leverage the rich textual information present in real-world data. With the ability to understand semantic information, large language models (LLMs) offer a promising solution to enhance fraud detection by incorporating textual data, such as user profiles and transaction descriptions. However, integrating LLMs with graph-based methods introduces two key challenges: (1) the neighborhood camouflage problem, where fraudulent nodes disguise themselves within normal network structures, and (2) the input size constraints of LLMs, making it difficult to process large, complex graphs with extensive textual data. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, Fraud Detection with LLM-enhanced Graph Neural Networks (FLAG), to address these challenges. FLAG integrates LLMs with graph-based fraud detection by introducing two main modules: semantic similarity neighbor sampling, which reduces the input size and further alleviates the influence of camouflaged neighbors by selecting neighbors having high semantic similarity with the target nodes, and LLM-based node enhancement, which extracts discriminative textual features by LLM to enhance node robustness against camouflaged neighbors. To further improve the model, we design a fine-tuning approach that enables the LLM to extract discriminative text more closely related to the node labels, enhancing the model's ability to differentiate between fraudulent and normal nodes. Extensive experiments on public datasets highlight the superiority of FLAG, showing average improvements of 3.14% in F1-macro and 6.97% in AUC. Furthermore, we have deployed FLAG in Alipay's credit risk assessment system and evaluated its performance on a real-world dataset. The results indicate a 0.9% improvement in the KS criterion, further underscoring FLAG's effectiveness.

In recent years, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) become very effective methods to utilize graphs and have been applied to many real-world applications, including recommendation, advertisement, and financial fraud detection. In fact, GNNs are mostly trained and test in the environments with the same distribution. However, in the real cases, selection bias are inevitably existed in both the node features and the graph structures, which will lead to serious impact on the GNN performance. Several works of literature have investigated the out-of-distribution (OOD) problem on the feature distribution, but little research specifically studies the effect caused by the bias of graph structure. However, graph structure is very fundamental for GNNs since it greatly affects the message propagation mechanism.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved great success in dealing with non-Euclidean graph-structured data and have been widely deployed in many real-world applications. However, their effectiveness is often jeopardized under class-imbalanced training sets. Most existing studies have analyzed class-imbalanced node classification from a supervised learning perspective, they do not fully utilize the large number of unlabeled nodes in semi-supervised scenarios. We claim that the supervised signal is just the tip of the iceberg and a large number of unlabeled nodes have not yet been effectively utilized. In this work, we propose IceBerg, a debiased self-training framework to address the class-imbalanced and few-shot challenges for GNNs at the same time. Specifically, to figure out the Matthew effect and label distribution shift in self-training, we propose Double Balancing, which can largely improve the performance of existing baselines with just a few lines of code as a simple plug-and-play module. Secondly, to enhance the long-range propagation capability of GNNs, we disentangle the propagation and transformation operations of GNNs. Therefore, the weak supervision signals can propagate more effectively to address the few-shot issue. In summary, we find that leveraging unlabeled nodes can significantly enhance the performance of GNNs in class-imbalanced and few-shot scenarios, and even small, surgical modifications can lead to substantial performance improvements. Systematic experiments on benchmark datasets show that our method can deliver considerable performance gain over existing class-imbalanced node classification baselines. Additionally, due to IceBerg's outstanding ability to leverage unsupervised signals, it also achieves state-of-the-art results in few-shot node classification scenarios. The code of IceBerg is available at: https://github.com/ZhixunLEE/IceBerg.

Link prediction, as a fundamental task for graph neural networks (GNNs), has boasted significant progress in varied domains. Its success is typically influenced by the expressive power of node representation, but recent developments reveal the inferior performance of low-degree nodes owing to their sparse neighbor connections, known as the degree-based long-tailed problem. Will the degree-based long-tailed distribution similarly constrain the efficacy of GNNs on link prediction? Unexpectedly, our study reveals that only a mild correlation exists between node degree and predictive accuracy, and more importantly, the number of common neighbors between node pairs exhibits a strong correlation with accuracy. Considering node pairs with less common neighbors, i.e., tail node pairs, make up a substantial fraction of the dataset but achieve worse performance, we propose that link prediction also faces the long-tailed problem. Therefore, link prediction of GNNs is greatly hindered by the tail node pairs. After knowing the weakness of link prediction, a natural question is how can we eliminate the negative effects of the skewed long-tailed distribution on common neighbors so as to improve the performance of link prediction? Towards this end, we introduce our long-tailed framework (LTLP), which is designed to enhance the performance of tail node pairs on link prediction by increasing common neighbors. Two key modules in LTLP respectively supplement high-quality edges for tail node pairs and enforce representational alignment between head and tail node pairs within the same category, thereby improving the performance of tail node pairs. Empirical results across five datasets confirm that our approach not only achieves SOTA performance but also greatly reduces the performance bias between the head and tail. These findings underscore the efficacy and superiority of our framework in addressing the long-tailed problem in link prediction.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved tremendous success in the task of graph classification and its diverse downstream real-world applications. Despite the huge success in learning graph representations, current GNN models have demonstrated their vulnerability to potentially existent adversarial examples on graph-structured data. Existing approaches are either limited to structure attacks or restricted to local informatio, urging for the design of a more general attack framework on graph classification, which faces significant challenges due to the complexity of generatinglocal-node-leveladversarial examples using theglobal-graph-levelinformation. To address this ”global-to-local” attack challenge, we present a novel and general frameworkCAMAto generate adversarial examples via manipulating graph structure and node features. Specifically, we make use of Graph Class Activation Mapping and its variant to produce node-level importance corresponding to the graph classification task. Then through a heuristic design of algorithms, we can perform both feature and structure attacks under unnoticeable perturbation budgets with the help of both node-level and subgraph-level importance. Experiments towards attacking four state-of-the-art graph classification models on six real-world benchmarks verify the flexibility and effectiveness of our framework.

User financial default prediction plays a critical role in credit risk forecasting and management. It aims at predicting the probability that the user will fail to make the repayments in the future. Previous methods mainly extract a set of user individual features regarding his own profiles and behaviors and build a binary-classification model to make default predictions. However, these methods cannot get satisfied results, especially for users with limited information. Although recent efforts suggest that default prediction can be improved by social relations, they fail to capture the higher-order topology structure at the level of small subgraph patterns. In this paper, we fill in this gap by proposing a motif-preserving Graph Neural Network with curriculum learning (MotifGNN) to jointly learn the lower-order structures from the original graph and higher-order structures from multi-view motif-based graphs for financial default prediction. Specifically, to solve the problem of weak connectivity in motif-based graphs, we design the motif-based gating mechanism. It utilizes the information learned from the original graph with good connectivity to strengthen the learning of the higher-order structure. And considering that the motif patterns of different samples are highly unbalanced, we propose a curriculum learning mechanism on the whole learning process to more focus on the samples with uncommon motif distributions. Extensive experiments on one public dataset and two industrial datasets all demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Uplift modeling aims to measure the incremental effect, which we call uplift, of a strategy or action on the users from randomized experiments or observational data. Most existing uplift methods only use individual data, which are usually not informative enough to capture the unobserved and complex hidden factors regarding the uplift. Furthermore, uplift modeling scenario usually has scarce labeled data, especially for the treatment group, which also poses a great challenge for model training. Considering that the neighbors’ features and the social relationships are very informative to characterize a user’s uplift, we propose a graph neural network-based framework with two uplift estimators, called GNUM, to learn from the social graph for uplift estimation. Specifically, we design the first estimator based on a class-transformed target. The estimator is general for all types of outcomes, and is able to comprehensively model the treatment and control group data together to approach the uplift. When the outcome is discrete, we further design the other uplift estimator based on our defined partial labels, which is able to utilize more labeled data from both the treatment and control groups, to further alleviate the label scarcity problem. Comprehensive experiments on a public dataset and two industrial datasets show a superior performance of our proposed framework over state-of-the-art methods under various evaluation metrics. The proposed algorithms have been deployed online to serve real-world uplift estimation scenarios.

Offline user identification is a scenario that users use their bio-information like faces as identification in offline venues, which has been applied in many offline scenarios such as verification in banks, check-in in hotels and making a purchase in offline merchants. In such a scenario, designing an identification approach to do extremely accurate offline user identification is critical. Most scenarios use faces to identify users and previous algorithms are mainly based on visual features and computer-vision models. However, due to the large variations such as pose, illumination and occlusions in offline scenarios, it remains a challenging problem for existing computer-vision algorithms to get a satisfying accuracy in real-world scenarios. Furthermore, billion-scale candidate users also require high efficiency and high accuracy for the approach.

Knowledge graph is generally incorporated into recommender systems to improve overall performance. Due to the generalization and scale of the knowledge graph, most knowledge relationships are not helpful for a target user-item prediction. To exploit the knowledge graph to capture target-specific knowledge relationships in recommender systems, we need to distill the knowledge graph to reserve the useful information and refine the knowledge to capture the users' preferences. To address the issues, we propose Knowledge-aware Conditional Attention Networks (KCAN), which is an end-to-end model to incorporate knowledge graph into a recommender system. Specifically, we use a knowledge-aware attention propagation manner to obtain the node representation first, which captures the global semantic similarity on the user-item network and the knowledge graph. Then given a target, i.e., a user-item pair, we automatically distill the knowledge graph into the target-specific subgraph based on the knowledge-aware attention. Afterward, by applying a conditional attention aggregation on the subgraph, we refine the knowledge graph to obtain target-specific node representations. Therefore, we can gain both representability and personalization to achieve overall performance. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework over the state-of-the-art algorithms.

Cold start problem is one of the most challenging and long-standing problems in recommender systems, and cross-domain recommendation (CDR) methods are effective for tackling it. Most cold-start related CDR methods require training a mapping function between high-dimensional embedding space using overlapping user data. However, the overlapping data is scarce in many recommendation tasks, which makes it difficult to train the mapping function. In this paper, we propose a new approach for CDR, which aims to alleviate the training difficulty. The proposed method can be viewed as a special parameterization of the mapping function without hurting expressiveness, which makes use of non-overlapping user data and leads to effective optimization. Extensive experiments on two real-world CDR tasks are performed to evaluate the proposed method. In the case that there are few overlapping data, the proposed method outperforms the existed state-of-the-art method by 14% (relative improvement).

Credit risk prediction is a fundamental problem for most financial institutions.Previous methods mainly adopt users' individual features on a single snapshot.However, users' individual features on financial platforms are usually too sparse to be informative.And previous methods ignore that the features, the behaviours and the credit risk of the users are all dynamic.To resolve the problems, we aim to model the credit risk prediction on dynamic graphs and propose a Temporal-Aware Graph Neural Network (TemGNN) to predict user credit risk.In detail, the model consists of three parts: i) a static model to extract the user's static factors regarding the credit risk.ii) a short-term graph encoder with special graph convolution modules for each snapshot to enrich the user's information through aggregating short-term temporal and structural information.iii) a long-term temporal model based on LSTM with interval-decayed attention to adaptively aggregate the long-term information from the static factors and interval-irregular dynamic snapshots.By combining the three parts together, our model is able to mine both the short-and long-term temporal-structural information.Experimentally, we use the users' authorized lending behaviours as the temporal graphs to do default prediction on Alipay.The results show that our model achieves the best performance among the state-of-the-art methods.

With the rapid growth of financial services, fraud detection has been a very important problem to guarantee a healthy environment for both users and providers. Conventional solutions for fraud detection mainly use some rule-based methods or distract some features manually to perform prediction. However, in financial services, users have rich interactions and they themselves always show multifaceted information. These data form a large multiview network, which is not fully exploited by conventional methods. Additionally, among the network, only very few of the users are labelled, which also poses a great challenge for only utilizing labeled data to achieve a satisfied performance on fraud detection. To address the problem, we expand the labeled data through their social relations to get the unlabeled data and propose a semi-supervised attentive graph neural network, named SemiGNN to utilize the multi-view labeled and unlabeled data for fraud detection. Moreover, we propose a hierarchical attention mechanism to better correlate different neighbors and different views. Simultaneously, the attention mechanism can make the model interpretable and tell what are the important factors for the fraud and why the users are predicted as fraud. Experimentally, we conduct the prediction task on the users of Alipay, one of the largest third-party online and offline cashless payment platform serving more than 4 hundreds of million users in China. By utilizing the social relations and the user attributes, our method can achieve a better accuracy compared with the state-of-the-art methods on two tasks. Moreover, the interpretable results also give interesting intuitions regarding the tasks.

Network embedding, aiming to embed a network into a low dimensional vector space while preserving the inherent structural properties of the network, has attracted considerable attentions recently. Most of the existing embedding methods embed nodes as point vectors in a low-dimensional continuous space. In this way, the formation of the edge is deterministic and only determined by the positions of the nodes. However, the formation and evolution of real-world networks are full of uncertainties, which makes these methods not optimal. To address the problem, we propose a novel Deep Variational Network Embedding in Wasserstein Space (DVNE) in this paper. The proposed method learns a Gaussian distribution in the Wasserstein space as the latent representation of each node, which can simultaneously preserve the network structure and model the uncertainty of nodes. Specifically, we use 2-Wasserstein distance as the similarity measure between the distributions, which can well preserve the transitivity in the network with a linear computational cost. Moreover, our method implies the mathematical relevance of mean and variance by the deep variational model, which can well capture the position of the node by the mean vectors and the uncertainties of nodes by the variance. Additionally, our method captures both the local and global network structure by preserving the first-order and second-order proximity in the network. Our experimental results demonstrate that our method can effectively model the uncertainty of nodes in networks, and show a substantial gain on real-world applications such as link prediction and multi-label classification compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

Network embedding is an important method to learn low-dimensional representations of vertexes in networks, aiming to capture and preserve the network structure. Almost all the existing network embedding methods adopt shallow models. However, since the underlying network structure is complex, shallow models cannot capture the highly non-linear network structure, resulting in sub-optimal network representations. Therefore, how to find a method that is able to effectively capture the highly non-linear network structure and preserve the global and local structure is an open yet important problem. To solve this problem, in this paper we propose a Structural Deep Network Embedding method, namely SDNE. More specifically, we first propose a semi-supervised deep model, which has multiple layers of non-linear functions, thereby being able to capture the highly non-linear network structure. Then we propose to exploit the first-order and second-order proximity jointly to preserve the network structure. The second-order proximity is used by the unsupervised component to capture the global network structure. While the first-order proximity is used as the supervised information in the supervised component to preserve the local network structure. By jointly optimizing them in the semi-supervised deep model, our method can preserve both the local and global network structure and is robust to sparse networks. Empirically, we conduct the experiments on five real-world networks, including a language network, a citation network and three social networks. The results show that compared to the baselines, our method can reconstruct the original network significantly better and achieves substantial gains in three applications, i.e. multi-label classification, link prediction and visualization.