Outlier detection in graph streams

Abstract

A number of applications in social networks, telecommunications, and mobile computing create massive streams of graphs. In many such applications, it is useful to detect structural abnormalities which are different from the “typical” behavior of the underlying network. In this paper, we will provide first results on the problem of structural outlier detection in massive network streams. Such problems are inherently challenging, because the problem of outlier detection is specially challenging because of the high volume of the underlying network stream. The stream scenario also increases the computational challenges for the approach. We use a structural connectivity model in order to define outliers in graph streams. In order to handle the sparsity problem of massive networks, we dynamically partition the network in order to construct statistically robust models of the connectivity behavior. We design a reservoir sampling method in order to maintain structural summaries of the underlying network. These structural summaries are designed in order to create robust, dynamic and efficient models for outlier detection in graph streams. We present experimental results illustrating the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.