Context Correlation Discrepancy Analysis for Graph Anomaly Detection

In unsupervised graph anomaly detection, existing methods usually focus on detecting outliers by learning local context information of nodes, while often ignoring the importance of global context. However, global context information can provide more comprehensive relationship information between nodes in the network. By considering the structure of the entire network, detection methods are able to identify potential dependencies and interaction patterns between nodes, which is crucial for anomaly detection. Therefore, we propose an innovative graph anomaly detection framework, termed CoCo (Context Correlation Discrepancy Analysis), which detects anomalies by meticulously evaluating variances in correlations. Specifically, CoCo leverages the strengths of Transformers in sequence processing to effectively capture both global and local contextual features of nodes by aggregating neighbor features at various hops. Subsequently, a correlation analysis module is employed to maximize the correlation between local and global contexts of each normal node. Unseen anomalies are ultimately detected by measuring the discrepancy in the correlation of nodes’ contextual features. Extensive experiments conducted on six datasets with synthetic outliers and five datasets with organic outliers have demonstrated the significant effectiveness of CoCo compared to existing methods.