Multitask Asynchronous Metalearning for Few-Shot Anomalous Node Detection in Dynamic Networks

Few-shot anomalous node detection in dynamic networks has been extensively investigated in the field of research. In this few-shot scenario, the detection of these anomalous nodes is particularly challenging due to the continuously evolving network topology and data distribution over time, which is known as concept drift. Concept drift refers to the phenomenon where the underlying concepts or patterns in the data generation process change over time, leading to varying data distributions across different periods. Due to these changes in data distribution, the patterns learned during training may become invalid under the new data distribution. Existing models primarily aim to enhance the representation of evolving node attributes and relationships to mitigate the impact of concept drift in few-shot scenarios. However, the scarcity of anomalous samples further limits the model's ability to learn new patterns, thereby reducing its effectiveness in addressing concept drift in few-shot scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose the multitask asynchronous metalearning framework (MAMF), which aims to mitigate bias induced by concept drift in few-shot anomalous node detection. Our framework consists of four main components: a feature extractor, an anomaly simulator, an asynchronous learner, and a type detector. The feature extractor captures the relative variations of each node in an evolving graph stream. The anomaly simulator uses generative adversarial models to learn anomaly distributions and generate samples at different time intervals. The asynchronous learner samples from various time distributions to create metatasks for anomalous node detection, allowing it to adapt to changes between these distributions. To aid in few-shot anomalous node detection, the type detector is used for anomaly type recognition. Our framework achieves AUC improvements of 5.12%, 6.87%, and 1.91% over the best existing methods on Wikipedia, Reddit, and Mooc datasets, respectively, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness in adapting to concept drift and detecting anomalous nodes.