Finding NeMo: Fishing in banking networks using network motifs

Abstract

Banking fraud causes billion-dollar losses for banks worldwide. In fraud detection, graphs help understand complex transaction patterns and discover new fraud schemes. This work explores graph patterns in a real-world transaction dataset by extracting and analyzing its network motifs. Since banking graphs are heterogeneous, we focus on heterogeneous network motifs. Additionally, we propose a novel network randomization process that generates valid banking graphs. From our exploratory analysis, we conclude that network motifs extract insightful and interpretable patterns.