Query-driven discovery of anomalous subgraphs in attributed graphs

For a detection problem, a user often has some prior knowledge about the structure-specific subgraphs of interest, but few traditional approaches are capable of employing this knowledge. The main technical challenge is that few approaches can efficiently model the space of connected subgraphs that are isomorphic to a query graph. We present a novel, efficient approach for optimizing a generic nonlinear cost function subject to a query-specific structural constraint. Our approach enjoys strong theoretical guarantees on the convergence of a nearly optimal solution and a low time complexity. For the case study, we specialize the nonlinear function to several well-known graph scan statistics for anomalous subgraph discovery. Empirical evidence demonstrates that our method is superior to state-of-the-art methods in several real-world anomaly detection tasks.