MEGAD: A Memory-Efficient Framework for Large-Scale Attributed Graph Anomaly Detection

Graph anomaly detection (GAD), with its ability to accurately identify anomalous patterns in graph data, plays a vital role in areas such as network security, social media platforms, and fraud detection. Graph autoencoder-based methods are widely used for GAD due to their efficiency and effectiveness in capturing complex patterns and learning meaningful representations. However, the above methods are constrained by hardware memory, hindering the detection for large-scale graph data. In this paper, we propose a Memory-Efficient framework for large-scale attributed Graph Anomaly Detection (MEGAD). Specifically, MEGAD first generates node embeddings and then refines them through a lightweight joint optimization model, ensuring minimal memory overhead. The optimized embeddings are subsequently fed into a detector to compute anomaly scores. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves comparable accuracy to state-of-the-art methods across multiple datasets while significantly reducing memory consumption on large-scale graphs.

Authors

• Yifan Zhang C 2 DL, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences University of Chinese Academy of Science
• Haolong Xiang Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology
• Xiaolong Xu Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology
• Zishun Rui
• Xiaoyong Li College of Meteorology and Oceanography, National University of Defense Technology, China
• Lianyong Qi China University of Petroleum Nanjing University
• Fei Dai

Keywords

• Data Mining: DM: Anomaly/outlier detection
• Data Mining: DM: Mining graphs