MINT: Detecting Fraudulent Behaviors from Time-series Relational Data

The e-commerce platforms, such as Shopee, have accumulated a huge volume of time-series relational data, which contains useful information on differentiating fraud users from benign users. Existing fraud behavior detection approaches typically model the time-series data with a vanilla Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) or combine the whole sequence as a single intention without considering the temporal behavioral patterns, row-level interactions, and different view intentions. In this paper, we present MINT, a Multiview row-INteractive Time-aware framework to detect fraudulent behaviors from time-series structured data. The key idea of MINT is to build a time-aware behavior graph for each user’s time-series relational data with each row represented as an action node. We utilize the user’s temporal information to construct three different graph convolutional matrices for hierarchically learning the user’s intentions from different views, that is, short-term, medium-term, and long-term intentions. To capture more meaningful row-level interactions and alleviate the over-smoothing issue in a vanilla time-aware behavior graph, we propose a novel gated neighbor interaction mechanism to calibrate the aggregated information by each action node. Since the receptive fields of the three graph convolutional layers are designed to grow nearly exponentially, our MINT requires many fewer layers than traditional deep graph neural networks (GNNs) to capture multi-hop neighboring information, and avoids recurrent feedforward propagation, thus leading to higher training efficiency and scalability. Our extensive experiments on the large-scale e-commerce datasets from Shopee with up to 4.6 billion records and a public dataset from Amazon show that MINT achieves superior performance over 10 state-of-the-art models and provides better interpretability and scalability.