Anomalous Node Detection in Blockchain Networks Based on Graph Neural Networks

Abstract

With the rapid development of blockchain technology, fraudulent activities have significantly increased, posing a major threat to the personal assets of blockchain users. The blockchain transaction network formed during user transactions can be represented as a graph consisting of nodes and edges, making it suitable for a graph data structure. Fraudulent nodes in the transaction network are referred to as anomalous nodes. In recent years, the mainstream method for detecting anomalous nodes in graphs has been the use of graph data mining techniques. However, anomalous nodes typically constitute only a small portion of the transaction network, known as the minority class, while the majority of nodes are normal nodes, referred to as the majority class. This discrepancy in sample sizes results in class imbalance data, where models tend to overfit the features of the majority class and neglect those of the minority class. This issue presents significant challenges for traditional graph data mining techniques. In this paper, we propose a novel graph neural network method to overcome class imbalance issues by improving the Graph Attention Network (GAT) and incorporating ensemble learning concepts. Our method combines GAT with a subtree attention mechanism and two ensemble learning methods: Bootstrap Aggregating (Bagging) and Categorical Boosting (CAT), called SGAT-BC. We conducted experiments on four real-world blockchain transaction datasets, and the results demonstrate that SGAT-BC outperforms existing baseline models.