# Revisiting Graph-Based Fraud Detection in Sight of Heterophily and Spectrum

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.06441 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06441/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [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)
- [node2vec: Scalable Feature Learning for Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00653/) (2016)
- [DeepWalk: Online Learning of Social Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1403.6652/) (2014)
- [Simplifying Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07153/) (2019)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning with Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13902/) (2020)
- [Adaptive Universal Generalized PageRank Graph Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07988/) (2020)
- [Measuring and Relieving the Over-smoothing Problem for Graph Neural Networks from the Topological View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03211/) (2019)
- [Beyond Low-frequency Information in Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00797/) (2021)
- [Enhancing Graph Neural Network-based Fraud Detectors against Camouflaged Fraudsters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08692/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Graph Neural Networks for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15508/) (2022)
- [From Amateurs to Connoisseurs: Modeling the Evolution of User Expertise through Online Reviews](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1303.4402/) (2013)
- [Alleviating the Inconsistency Problem of Applying Graph Neural Network to Fraud Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00625/) (2020)
- [PastNet: Introducing Physical Inductive Biases for Spatio-temporal Video Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11421/) (2023)
- [Label Information Enhanced Fraud Detection against Low Homophily in Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10407/) (2023)
- [An Affect-Rich Neural Conversational Model with Biased Attention and Weighted Cross-Entropy Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07078/) (2018)
- [Few-shot Message-Enhanced Contrastive Learning for Graph Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10370/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Deep Graph Anomaly Detection: A Survey and New Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09957/) (2024)
- [The Heterophilic Graph Learning Handbook: Benchmarks, Models, Theoretical Analysis, Applications and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09618/) (2024)
- [A Label-Free Heterophily-Guided Approach for Unsupervised Graph Fraud Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13308/) (2025)
- [DGP: A Dual-Granularity Prompting Framework for Fraud Detection with Graph-Enhanced LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21653/) (2025)
- [Correcting False Alarms from Unseen: Adapting Graph Anomaly Detectors at Test Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07023/) (2025)
- [Breaking the Discretization Barrier of Continuous Physics Simulation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17955/) (2025)
- [HeroFilter: Adaptive Spectral Graph Filter for Varying Heterophilic Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10864/) (2025)
- [UMGAD: Unsupervised Multiplex Graph Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12556/) (2024)
- [Beyond Sparse Supervision: Diffusion-Guided Learning for Few-Shot Graph Fraud Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28134/) (2026)
- [SLFNet: Generating Semantic Logic Forms from Natural Language Using Semantic Probability Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19936/) (2024)
- [Detecting LLM-Generated Spam Reviews by Integrating Language Model Embeddings and Graph Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01801/) (2025)
- [GLADformer: A Mixed Perspective for Graph-level Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00734/) (2024)
- [GLADMamba: Unsupervised Graph-Level Anomaly Detection Powered by Selective State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17903/) (2025)
- [ALF: Advertiser Large Foundation Model for Multi-Modal Advertiser Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18785/) (2025)
- [DAM-GT: Dual Positional Encoding-Based Attention Masking Graph Transformer for Node Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17660/) (2025)
- [Unlocking Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Dynamics through Physics-Guided Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24216/) (2025)
- [Balanced Anomaly-guided Ego-graph Diffusion Model for Inductive Graph Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05232/) (2026)
- [TFWaveFormer: Temporal-Frequency Collaborative Multi-level Wavelet Transformer for Dynamic Link Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03963/) (2026)
- [Feature Transformation Enhanced Jacobi Polynomial Graph Filtering for Graph Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.27144/) (2026)
- [Graph Anomaly Detection as Finite-Horizon Control: Training-Free Scoring via Empirical Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38424/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph-based fraud detection (GFD) can be regarded as a challenging semi-supervised node binary classification task. In recent years, Graph Neural Networks (GNN) have been widely applied to GFD, characterizing the anomalous possibility of a node by aggregating neighbor information. However, fraud graphs are inherently heterophilic, thus most of GNNs perform poorly due to their assumption of homophily. In addition, due to the existence of heterophily and class imbalance problem, the existing models do not fully utilize the precious node label information. To address the above issues, this paper proposes a semi-supervised GNN-based fraud detector SEC-GFD. This detector includes a hybrid filtering module and a local environmental constraint module, the two modules are utilized to solve heterophily and label utilization problem respectively. The first module starts from the perspective of the spectral domain, and solves the heterophily problem to a certain extent. Specifically, it divides the spectrum into various mixed-frequency bands based on the correlation between spectrum energy distribution and heterophily. Then in order to make full use of the node label information, a local environmental constraint module is adaptively designed. The comprehensive experimental results on four real-world fraud detection datasets denote that SEC-GFD outperforms other competitive graph-based fraud detectors. We release our code at https://github.com/Sunxkissed/SEC-GFD.