Discovering suspicious behavior in multilayer social networks

Discovering suspicious and illicit behavior in social networks is a significant problem in social network analysis. The patterns of interactions of suspicious users are quite different from their peers and can be identified by using anomaly detection techniques. The existing anomaly detection techniques on social networks focus on networks with only one type of interaction among the users. However, human interactions are inherently multiplex in nature with multiple types of relationships existing among the users, leading to the formation of multilayer social networks. In this paper, we investigate the problem of anomaly detection on multilayer social networks by combining the rich information available in multiple network layers. We propose a pioneer approach namely ADOMS (Anomaly Detection On Multilayer Social networks), an unsupervised, parameter-free, and network feature-based methodology, that automatically detects anomalous users in a multilayer social network and rank them according to their anomalousness. We consider the two well-known anomalous patterns of clique/near-clique and star/near-star anomalies in social networks, and users are ranked according to the degree of similarity of their neighborhoods in different layers to stars or cliques. Experimental results on several real-world multilayer network datasets demonstrate that our approach can effectively detect anomalous nodes in multilayer social networks. •Anomalies in social networks can signify suspicious and illegal behavior.•Anomaly detection is a significant problem in social network analysis.•Individuals can interact in multiple ways simultaneously forming multilayer networks.•Introducing and studying anomaly detection problem on multilayer social networks.•A network feature-based approach to rank the nodes according to their anomalousness.