DccGraph: Detecting Criminal Communities with Augmented Criminal Network Construction and Graph Neural Network

A criminal community is an interior group where individuals commit criminal activities with high intention. Therefore, the detection is of great importance to prevent potential crimes early in the stage. Prior studies focused on methods in modularity or network analysis based on topology. These approaches, however, do not work well for detecting minority communities, which is also a key issue in criminal detection. The main reasons are: 1) modularity-based approach cannot identify the inside community structure due to the resolution limit, 2) topology-based network analysis cannot fully leverage personal feature information, such as the amount and frequency of criminal transactions. To address these problems, this paper proposes a novel framework named DccGraph (Detect criminal communities using a Graph neural network) to enhance the overall performance of detecting criminal communities, especially minority ones. First, we extract the feature information of criminals and balance the distribution of criminal community members to construct an Augmented Criminal Network(ACN), which alleviates representation collapse and distinguish the feature of criminals in minority communities. In that case, it is capable to go beyond the resolution limit and locate minority communities effectively. Then, we design a criminal-oriented siamese graph encoder to capture both structural and feature information of criminals in the ACN. Specifically, feature interference and connection disturbance of criminals are employed to enrich the feature representation. To the best of our knowledge, DccGraph is the first framework to apply a graph neural network on criminal community detection. Experiments on several real-life dataset and benchmark datasets show that: DccGraph successfully outperforms eight baselines by 29.25%, 48.04%, 35.37%, and 40.98% on ACC, NMI, ARI, and F1, respectively. The dataset and the code for this framework are publicly available.