Safeguarding Fraud Detection from Attacks: A Robust Graph Learning Approach

Financial fraud is one of the most significant social issues and has caused tremendous property losses. Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been applied to anti-fraud practices and achieved decent results. However, recent researches have discovered flaws in the robustness of fraud-detection models based on GNNs, enabling fraudsters to mislead them through attacks like data poisoning. In addition, most existing attack-defense models tend to study on ideal settings and lose information during truncation or filtering, which lowers their performances in complicated financial fraud cases. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel robust anti-fraud GNN model. In particular, we first design an attack algorithm tampering with both features and structures of graph data to simulate fraudsters' attacking behaviors in real-life complex fraud scenarios. Then we apply singular value decomposition to the graph and learn the decomposed matrices in a GNN model with specifically designed joint losses. This enables our model to learn the graph patterns in low-rank subspaces without losing too much detailed information and fit the graph structure to characteristics including class-homophily and sparsity to guarantee robustness. The proposed approach is experimented on real-world fraud datasets, which demonstrates its advantages in fraud detection and robustness compared with the state-of-the-art baselines.