EPM: Evolutionary Perception Method for Anomaly Detection in Noisy Dynamic Graphs

Abstract

With the rapid expansion of interactions across various domains such as social networks, transaction networks, and IP-IP networks, anomaly detection in dynamic graphs has become increasingly critical for mitigating potential risks. However, existing anomaly detection methods often assume noise-free dynamic graphs, overlooking the prevalence of noisy dynamic graphs in real-world applications. Specifically, noisy dynamic graphs affected by structural noises—such as spurious and missing nodes and edges—struggle to consistently provide reliable structural evidence for anomaly detection. To tackle this challenge, we propose an Evolutionary Perception Method (EPM) for identifying anomalous nodes in noisy dynamic graphs by resisting the interference of structural noises. EPM primarily consists of two components: a dynamic fitter and a filtering reviser. The dynamic fitter characterizes the interaction dynamics of nodes that removes and generates links at each period as a multiple superposition state, utilizing various link prediction algorithms to fit evolutionary mechanisms. Additionally, the filtering reviser designs evolutional entropies to quantify the evolutional uncertainty in multiple superposition states, further reconstructing the Kalman filter to optimize these entropies. Extensive experiments have proved that our proposed EPM outperforms state-of-the-art methods in discovering anomalous nodes in noisy dynamic graphs.