# Improving Fraud Detection via Hierarchical Attention-based Graph Neural Network

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.06096 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06096/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Feb 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00826/) (2018)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00596/) (2019)
- [LightGCN: Simplifying and Powering Graph Convolution Network for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.02126/) (2020)
- [Graph Convolutional Neural Networks for Web-Scale Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01973/) (2018)
- [Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks: A Deep Learning Framework for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.04875/) (2017)
- [Heterogeneous Graph Attention Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07293/) (2019)
- [Holistically-Nested Edge Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06375/) (2015)
- [Enhancing Graph Neural Network-based Fraud Detectors against Camouflaged Fraudsters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08692/) (2020)
- [A Survey of the Recent Architectures of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.06032/) (2019)
- [GaAN: Gated Attention Networks for Learning on Large and Spatiotemporal Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07294/) (2018)
- [Rumor Detection on Social Media with Bi-Directional Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06362/) (2020)
- [A Semi-supervised Graph Attentive Network for Financial Fraud Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01171/) (2020)
- [From Amateurs to Connoisseurs: Modeling the Evolution of User Expertise through Online Reviews](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1303.4402/) (2013)
- [Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks for Malicious Account Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12307/) (2020)
- [Alleviating the Inconsistency Problem of Applying Graph Neural Network to Fraud Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00625/) (2020)
- [A Neural Influence Diffusion Model for Social Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10322/) (2019)
- [GeniePath: Graph Neural Networks with Adaptive Receptive Paths](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00910/) (2018)
- [Spam Review Detection with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10679/) (2019)
- [GCN-Based User Representation Learning for Unifying Robust Recommendation and Fraudster Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10150/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Similarity-Navigated Conformal Prediction for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14303/) (2024)
- [GnnXemplar: Exemplars to Explanations -- Natural Language Rules for Global GNN Interpretability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18376/) (2025)
- [Signed Latent Factors for Spamming Activity Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13814/) (2022)
- [Cooperative Minibatching in Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12403/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Graph Neural Networks for Fraud Detection in Ride Hailing Platforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.23777/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph neural networks (GNN) have emerged as a powerful tool for fraud detection tasks, where fraudulent nodes are identified by aggregating neighbor information via different relations. To get around such detection, crafty fraudsters resort to camouflage via connecting to legitimate users (i.e., relation camouflage) or providing seemingly legitimate feedbacks (i.e., feature camouflage). A wide-spread solution reinforces the GNN aggregation process with neighbor selectors according to original node features. This method may carry limitations when identifying fraudsters not only with the relation camouflage, but with the feature camouflage making them hard to distinguish from their legitimate neighbors. In this paper, we propose a Hierarchical Attention-based Graph Neural Network (HA-GNN) for fraud detection, which incorporates weighted adjacency matrices across different relations against camouflage. This is motivated in the Relational Density Theory and is exploited for forming a hierarchical attention-based graph neural network. Specifically, we design a relation attention module to reflect the tie strength between two nodes, while a neighborhood attention module to capture the long-range structural affinity associated with the graph. We generate node embeddings by aggregating information from local/long-range structures and original node features. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model over the state-of-the-arts.