Accelerated Local Anomaly Detection via Resolving Attributed Networks

Attributed networks, in which network connectivity and node attributes are available, have been increasingly used to model real-world information systems, such as social media and e-commerce platforms. While outlier detection has been extensively studied to identify anomalies that deviate from certain chosen background, existing algorithms cannot be directly applied on attributed networks due to the heterogeneous types of information and the scale of real-world data. Meanwhile, it has been observed that local anomalies, which may align with global condition, are hard to be detected by existing algorithms with interpretability. Motivated by the observations, in this paper, we propose to study the problem of effective and efficient local anomaly detection in attributed networks. In particular, we design a collective way for modeling heterogeneous network and attribute information, and develop a novel and efficient distributed optimization algorithm to handle large-scale data. In the experiments, we compare the proposed framework with the state-of-the-art methods on both real and synthetic datasets, and demonstrate its effectiveness and efficiency through quantitative evaluation and case studies.