Graph anomaly detection (GAD) has gained increasing attention in various attribute graph applications, i.e., social communication and financial fraud transaction networks. Recently, graph contrastive learning (GCL)-based methods have been widely adopted as the mainstream for GAD with remarkable success. However, existing GCL strategies in GAD mainly focus on node-node and node-subgraph contrast and fail to explore subgraph-subgraph level comparison. Furthermore, the different sizes or component node indices of the sampled subgraph pairs may cause the "nonaligned" issue, making it difficult to accurately measure the similarity of subgraph pairs. In this article, we propose a novel subgraph-aligned multiview contrastive approach for graph anomaly detection, named SAMCL, which fills the subgraph-subgraph contrastive-level blank for GAD tasks. Specifically, we first generate the multiview augmented subgraphs by capturing different neighbors of target nodes forming contrasting subgraph pairs. Then, to fulfill the nonaligned subgraph pair contrast, we propose a subgraph-aligned strategy that estimates similarities with the Earth mover's distance (EMD) of both considering the node embedding distributions and typology awareness. With the newly established similarity measure for subgraphs, we conduct the interview subgraph-aligned contrastive learning module to better detect changes for nodes with different local subgraphs. Moreover, we conduct intraview node-subgraph contrastive learning to supplement richer information on abnormalities. Finally, we also employ the node reconstruction task for the masked subgraph to measure the local change of the target node. Finally, the anomaly score for each node is jointly calculated by these three modules. Extensive experiments conducted on benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness of our approach compared to existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods with significant performance gains (up to 6.36% improvement on ACM). Our code can be verified at https://github.com/hujingtao/SAMCL.

Recently, graph anomaly detection on attributed networks has attracted growing attention in data mining and machine learning communities. Apart from attribute anomalies, graph anomaly detection also aims at suspicious topological-abnormal nodes that exhibit collective anomalous behavior. Closely connected uncorrelated node groups form uncommonly dense substructures in the network. However, existing methods overlook that the topology anomaly detection performance can be improved by recognizing such a collective pattern. To this end, we propose a new graph anomaly detection framework on attributed networks via substructure awareness (ARISE). Unlike previous algorithms, we focus on the substructures in the graph to discern abnormalities. Specifically, we establish a region proposal module to discover high-density substructures in the network as suspicious regions. The average node-pair similarity can be regarded as the topology anomaly degree of nodes within substructures. Generally, the lower the similarity, the higher the probability that internal nodes are topology anomalies. To distill better embeddings of node attributes, we further introduce a graph contrastive learning scheme, which observes attribute anomalies in the meantime. In this way, ARISE can detect both topology and attribute anomalies. Ultimately, extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that ARISE greatly improves detection performance (up to 7.30% AUC and 17.46% AUPRC gains) compared to state-of-the-art attributed networks anomaly detection (ANAD) algorithms.

Graph anomaly detection (GAD) is a vital task in graph-based machine learning and has been widely applied in many real-world applications. The primary goal of GAD is to capture anomalous nodes from graph datasets, which evidently deviate from the majority of nodes. Recent methods have paid attention to various scales of contrastive strategies for GAD, i.e., node-subgraph and node-node contrasts. However, they neglect the subgraph-subgraph comparison information which the normal and abnormal subgraph pairs behave differently in terms of embeddings and structures in GAD, resulting in sub-optimal task performance. In this paper, we fulfill the above idea in the proposed multi-view multi-scale contrastive learning framework with subgraph-subgraph contrast for the first practice. To be specific, we regard the original input graph as the first view and generate the second view by graph augmentation with edge modifications. With the guidance of maximizing the similarity of the subgraph pairs, the proposed subgraph-subgraph contrast contributes to more robust subgraph embeddings despite of the structure variation. Moreover, the introduced subgraph-subgraph contrast cooperates well with the widely-adopted node-subgraph and node-node contrastive counterparts for mutual GAD performance promotions. Besides, we also conduct sufficient experiments to investigate the impact of different graph augmentation approaches on detection performance. The comprehensive experimental results well demonstrate the superiority of our method compared with the state-of-the-art approaches and the effectiveness of the multi-view subgraph pair contrastive strategy for the GAD task. The source code is released at https://github.com/FelixDJC/GRADATE.

Contrastive deep graph clustering, which aims to divide nodes into disjoint groups via contrastive mechanisms, is a challenging research spot. Among the recent works, hard sample mining-based algorithms have achieved great attention for their promising performance. However, we find that the existing hard sample mining methods have two problems as follows. 1) In the hardness measurement, the important structural information is overlooked for similarity calculation, degrading the representativeness of the selected hard negative samples. 2) Previous works merely focus on the hard negative sample pairs while neglecting the hard positive sample pairs. Nevertheless, samples within the same cluster but with low similarity should also be carefully learned. To solve the problems, we propose a novel contrastive deep graph clustering method dubbed Hard Sample Aware Network (HSAN) by introducing a comprehensive similarity measure criterion and a general dynamic sample weighing strategy. Concretely, in our algorithm, the similarities between samples are calculated by considering both the attribute embeddings and the structure embeddings, better revealing sample relationships and assisting hardness measurement. Moreover, under the guidance of the carefully collected high-confidence clustering information, our proposed weight modulating function will first recognize the positive and negative samples and then dynamically up-weight the hard sample pairs while down-weighting the easy ones. In this way, our method can mine not only the hard negative samples but also the hard positive sample, thus improving the discriminative capability of the samples further. Extensive experiments and analyses demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of our proposed method. The source code of HSAN is shared at https://github.com/yueliu1999/HSAN and a collection (papers, codes and, datasets) of deep graph clustering is shared at https://github.com/yueliu1999/Awesome-Deep-Graph-Clustering on Github.

Graph anomaly detection (GAD) has attracted increasing attention in machine learning and data mining. Recent works have mainly focused on how to capture richer information to improve the quality of node embeddings for GAD. Despite their significant advances in detection performance, there is still a relative dearth of research on the properties of the task. GAD aims to discern the anomalies that deviate from most nodes. However, the model is prone to learn the pattern of normal samples which make up the majority of samples. Meanwhile, anomalies can be easily detected when their behaviors differ from normality. Therefore, the performance can be further improved by enhancing the ability to learn the normal pattern. To this end, we propose a normality learning-based GAD framework via multi-scale contrastive learning networks (NLGAD for abbreviation). Specifically, we first initialize the model with the contrastive networks on different scales. To provide sufficient and reliable normal nodes for normality learning, we design an effective hybrid strategy for normality selection. Finally, the model is refined with the only input of reliable normal nodes and learns a more accurate estimate of normality so that anomalous nodes can be more easily distinguished. Eventually, extensive experiments on six benchmark graph datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our normality learning-based scheme on GAD. Notably, the proposed algorithm improves the detection performance (up to 5.89% AUC gain) compared with the state-of-the-art methods. The source code is released at https://github.com/FelixDJC/NLGAD.