CANON: Complex Analytics of Network of Networks for Modeling Adversarial Activities

Networks are natural representations in modeling adversarial activities, such as smuggling, human trafficking, and illegal arms dealing. However, such activities are often covert and embedded across multiple domains and sources. They are generally not detectable and recognizable from the perspective of an isolated network, and only become apparent when multiple networks are analyzed in a unified m anner. T o t his e nd, we propose Complex Analytics of Network of Networks (CANON), a mathematical and computational framework for modeling adversarial activities from large-scale, multi-sourced data inputs. Central to our framework is a network-of-networks model, where nodes and edges can be defined across different domains and at multiple resolutions. Based on this model, we address the key challenges in modeling adversarial activities via four technical components, including optimization-based network alignment, network embedding and conditioning, approximate subgraph matching, and investigative subgraph discovery.In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of the individual components as well as integrating these components into a unified system using a modular microservice architecture. Extensive experiments have been conducted in both synthetics and real-world datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed system under the DARPA Modeling Adversarial Activity (MAA) program.