OddBall: spotting anomalies in weighted graphs

  • Authors:
  • Leman Akoglu;Mary McGlohon;Christos Faloutsos

  • Affiliations:
  • School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University;School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University;School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University

  • Venue:
  • PAKDD'10 Proceedings of the 14th Pacific-Asia conference on Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining - Volume Part II
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Given a large, weighted graph, how can we find anomalies? Which rules should be violated, before we label a node as an anomaly? We propose the oddball algorithm, to find such nodes The contributions are the following: (a) we discover several new rules (power laws) in density, weights, ranks and eigenvalues that seem to govern the so-called “neighborhood sub-graphs” and we show how to use these rules for anomaly detection; (b) we carefully choose features, and design oddball, so that it is scalable and it can work un-supervised (no user-defined constants) and (c) we report experiments on many real graphs with up to 1.6 million nodes, where oddball indeed spots unusual nodes that agree with intuition.