# DELATOR: Money Laundering Detection via Multi-Task Learning on Large Transaction Graphs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.10293 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10293/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Modeling Relational Data with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06103/) (2017)
- [Heterogeneous Graph Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01332/) (2020)
- [EvolveGCN: Evolving Graph Convolutional Networks for Dynamic Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10191/) (2019)
- [Deep Graph Library: A Graph-Centric, Highly-Performant Package for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01315/) (2019)
- [Anti-Money Laundering in Bitcoin: Experimenting with Graph Convolutional Networks for Financial Forensics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02591/) (2019)
- [GraphSMOTE: Imbalanced Node Classification on Graphs with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08826/) (2021)
- [DGL-KE: Training Knowledge Graph Embeddings at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08532/) (2020)
- [CatBoost: unbiased boosting with categorical features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.09516/) (2017)
- [Class Imbalance Problem in Data Mining Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1305.1707/) (2013)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Network Analytics for Anti-Money Laundering -- A Systematic Literature Review and Experimental Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19383/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Money laundering has become one of the most relevant criminal activities in modern societies, as it causes massive financial losses for governments, banks and other institutions. Detecting such activities is among the top priorities when it comes to financial analysis, but current approaches are often costly and labor intensive partly due to the sheer amount of data to be analyzed. Hence, there is a growing need for automatic anti-money laundering systems to assist experts. In this work, we propose DELATOR, a novel framework for detecting money laundering activities based on graph neural networks that learn from large-scale temporal graphs. DELATOR provides an effective and efficient method for learning from heavily imbalanced graph data, by adapting concepts from the GraphSMOTE framework and incorporating elements of multi-task learning to obtain rich node embeddings for node classification. DELATOR outperforms all considered baselines, including an off-the-shelf solution from Amazon AWS by 23% with respect to AUC-ROC. We also conducted real experiments that led to the discovery of 7 new suspicious cases among the 50 analyzed ones, which have been reported to the authorities.