Detecting Anomalies in Dynamic Graphs via Memory enhanced Normality

Anomaly detection in dynamic graphs presents a significant challenge due to the temporal evolution of graph structures and attributes. The conventional approaches that tackle this problem typically employ an unsupervised learning framework, capturing normality patterns with exclusive normal data during training and identifying deviations as anomalies during testing. However, these methods face critical drawbacks: they either only depend on proxy tasks for representation without directly pinpointing normal patterns, or they neglect to differentiate between spatial and temporal normality patterns. More recent methods that use contrastive learning with negative sampling also face high computational costs, limiting their scalability to large graphs. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel Spatial-Temporal memories-enhanced graph autoencoder (STRIPE). Initially, STRIPE employs Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and gated temporal convolution layers to extract spatial and temporal features. Then STRIPE incorporates separate spatial and temporal memory networks to capture and store prototypes of normal patterns, respectively. These stored patterns are retrieved and integrated with encoded graph embeddings through a mutual attention mechanism. Finally, the integrated features are fed into the decoder to reconstruct the graph streams which serve as the proxy task for anomaly detection. This comprehensive approach not only minimizes reconstruction errors but also emphasizes the compactness and distinctiveness of the embeddings w.r.t. the nearest memory prototypes. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of STRIPE, where STRIPE significantly outperforms existing methods with 5.8% improvement in AUC scores and 4.62X faster in training time.