# Robust Anomaly Detection Under Normality Distribution Shift in Dynamic Graphs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17400 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17400/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Sep 2025.

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

- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning with Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13902/) (2020)
- [Strategies for Pre-training Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12265/) (2019)
- [Graph Random Neural Network for Semi-Supervised Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11079/) (2020)
- [Dynamic Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network for Traffic Prediction: Benchmark and Solution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14917/) (2021)
- [OOD-GNN: Out-of-Distribution Generalized Graph Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03806/) (2021)
- [Anomaly Detection in Dynamic Graphs via Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09876/) (2021)
- [Dynamic Graph Neural Networks for Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07368/) (2021)
- [Structural Temporal Graph Neural Networks for Anomaly Detection in Dynamic Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07427/) (2020)
- [GC-LSTM: Graph Convolution Embedded LSTM for Dynamic Link Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04206/) (2018)
- [Neighbor Contrastive Learning on Learnable Graph Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01404/) (2023)
- [Generalizing to Evolving Domains with Latent Structure-Aware Sequential Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07649/) (2022)
- [Spectral Invariant Learning for Dynamic Graphs under Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05026/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Deep Graph Learning under Distribution Shifts: from Graph Out-of-Distribution Generalization to Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19265/) (2024)
- [Foresee What You Will Learn: Data Augmentation for Domain Generalization in Non-stationary Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07845/) (2023)

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

- [Feature-Context Consistency: Unsupervised Adversarial Detection with Drift Stability on Attributed Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.16694/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Anomaly detection in dynamic graphs is a critical task with broad real-world applications, including social networks, e-commerce, and cybersecurity. Most existing methods assume that normal patterns remain stable over time; however, this assumption often fails in practice due to the phenomenon we refer to as normality distribution shift (NDS), where normal behaviors evolve over time. Ignoring NDS can lead models to misclassify shifted normal instances as anomalies, degrading detection performance. To tackle this issue, we propose WhENDS, a novel unsupervised anomaly detection method that aligns normal edge embeddings across time by estimating distributional statistics and applying whitening transformations. Extensive experiments on four widely-used dynamic graph datasets show that WhENDS consistently outperforms nine strong baselines, achieving state-of-the-art results and underscoring the importance of addressing NDS in dynamic graph anomaly detection.