Fast and Attributed Change Detection on Dynamic Graphs with Density of States

Abstract

How can we detect traffic disturbances from international flight transportation logs, or changes to collaboration dynamics in academic networks? These problems can be formulated as detecting anomalous change points in a dynamic graph. Current solutions do not scale well to large real world graphs, lack robustness to large amount of node additions / deletions and overlook changes in node attributes. To address these limitations, we propose a novel spectral method: Scalable Change Point Detection (SCPD). SCPD generates an embedding for each graph snapshot by efficiently approximating the distribution of the Laplacian spectrum at each step. SCPD can also capture shifts in node attributes by tracking correlations between attributes and eigenvectors. Through extensive experiments using synthetic and real world data, we show that SCPD (a) achieves state-of-the-art performance, (b) is significantly faster than the state-of-the-art methods and can easily process millions of edges in a few CPU minutes, (c) can effectively tackle a large quantity of node attributes, additions or deletions and (d) discovers interesting events in large real world graphs. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/shenyangHuang/SCPD.git.