skip to main content


Title: Fast graph scan statistics optimization using algebraic fingerprints
Graph scan statistics have become popular for event detection in networks. This methodology involves finding connected subgraphs that maximize a certain anomaly function, but maximizing these functions is computationally hard in general. We develop a novel approach for graph scan statistics with connectivity constraints. Our algorithm Approx-MultilinearScan relies on an algebraic technique called multilinear detection, and it improves over prior methods for large networks. We also develop a Pregel-based parallel version of this algorithm in Giraph, MultilinearScanGiraph, that allows us to solve instances with over 40 million edges, which is more than one order of magnitude larger than existing methods.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1633028
NSF-PAR ID:
10067734
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
2017 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data)
Page Range / eLocation ID:
905 to 910
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. We propose a new approach, the calibrated nonparametric scan statistic (CNSS), for more accurate detection of anomalous patterns in large-scale, real-world graphs. Scan statistics identify connected subgraphs that are interesting or unexpected through maximization of a likelihood ratio statistic; in particular, nonparametric scan statistics (NPSSs) identify subgraphs with a higher than expected proportion of individually significant nodes. However, we show that recently proposed NPSS methods are miscalibrated, failing to account for the maximization of the statistic over the multiplicity of subgraphs. This results in both reduced detection power for subtle signals, and low precision of the detected subgraph even for stronger signals. Thus we develop a new statistical approach to recalibrate NPSSs, correctly adjusting for multiple hypothesis testing and taking the underlying graph structure into account. While the recalibration, based on randomization testing, is computationally expensive, we propose both an efficient (approximate) algorithm and new, closed-form lower bounds (on the expected maximum proportion of significant nodes for subgraphs of a given size, under the null hypothesis of no anomalous patterns). These advances, along with the integration of recent core-tree decomposition methods, enable CNSS to scale to large real-world graphs, with substantial improvement in the accuracy of detected subgraphs. Extensive experiments on both semi-synthetic and real-world datasets are demonstrated to validate the effectiveness of our proposed methods, in comparison with state-of-the-art counterparts. 
    more » « less
  2. Summary A nonparametric framework for changepoint detection, based on scan statistics utilizing graphs that represent similarities among observations, is gaining attention owing to its flexibility and good performance for high-dimensional and non-Euclidean data sequences. However, this graph-based framework faces challenges when there are repeated observations in the sequence, which is often the case for discrete data such as network data. In this article we extend the graph-based framework to solve this problem by averaging or taking the union of all possible optimal graphs resulting from repeated observations. We consider both the single-changepoint alternative and the changed-interval alternative, and derive analytical formulas to control the Type I error for the new methods, making them readily applicable to large datasets. The extended methods are illustrated on an application in detecting changes in a sequence of dynamic networks over time. All proposed methods are implemented in an $\texttt{R}$ package $\texttt{gSeg}$ available on CRAN. 
    more » « less
  3. Summary

    Community detection in networks is a key exploratory tool with applications in a diverse set of areas, ranging from finding communities in social and biological networks to identifying link farms in the World Wide Web. The problem of finding communities or clusters in a network has received much attention from statistics, physics and computer science. However, most clustering algorithms assume knowledge of the number of clusters k. We propose to determine k automatically in a graph generated from a stochastic block model by using a hypothesis test of independent interest. Our main contribution is twofold; first, we theoretically establish the limiting distribution of the principal eigenvalue of the suitably centred and scaled adjacency matrix and use that distribution for our test of the hypothesis that a random graph is of Erdős–Rényi (noise) type. Secondly, we use this test to design a recursive bipartitioning algorithm, which naturally uncovers nested community structure. Using simulations and quantifiable classification tasks on real world networks with ground truth, we show that our algorithm outperforms state of the art methods.

     
    more » « less
  4. Scan statistics is one of the most popular approaches for anomaly detection in spatial and network data. In practice, there are numerous sources of uncertainty in the observed data. However, most prior works have overlooked such uncertainty, which can affect the accuracy and inferences of such meth- ods. In this paper, we develop the first systematic approach to incorporating uncertainty in scan statistics. We study two formulations for robust scan statistics, one based on the sam- ple average approximation and the other using a max-min objective. We show that uncertainty significantly increases the computational complexity of these problems. Rigorous algorithms and efficient heuristics for both formulations are developed with justification of theoretical bounds. We evaluate our proposed methods on synthetic and real datasets, and we observe that our methods give significant improvement in the detection power as well as optimization objective, relative to a baseline. 
    more » « less
  5. null (Ed.)
    Network anomaly detection aims to find network elements (e.g., nodes, edges, subgraphs) with significantly different behaviors from the vast majority. It has a profound impact in a variety of applications ranging from finance, healthcare to social network analysis. Due to the unbearable labeling cost, existing methods are predominately developed in an unsupervised manner. Nonetheless, the anomalies they identify may turn out to be data noises or uninteresting data instances due to the lack of prior knowledge on the anomalies of interest. Hence, it is critical to investigate and develop few-shot learning for network anomaly detection. In real-world scenarios, few labeled anomalies are also easy to be accessed on similar networks from the same domain as the target network, while most of the existing works omit to leverage them and merely focus on a single network. Taking advantage of this potential, in this work, we tackle the problem of few-shot network anomaly detection by (1) proposing a new family of graph neural networks -- Graph Deviation Networks (GDN) that can leverage a small number of labeled anomalies for enforcing statistically significant deviations between abnormal and normal nodes on a network; (2) equipping the proposed GDN with a new cross- network meta-learning algorithm to realize few-shot network anomaly detection by transferring meta-knowledge from multiple auxiliary networks. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach on few-shot or even one-shot network anomaly detection. 
    more » « less