  The problem of anomaly detection has been studied for a long time. In short,
anomalies are abnormal or unlikely things. In financial networks, thieves and
illegal activities are often anomalous in nature. Members of a network want to
detect anomalies as soon as possible to prevent them from harming the network's
community and integrity. Many Machine Learning techniques have been proposed to
deal with this problem; some results appear to be quite promising but there is
no obvious superior method. In this paper, we consider anomaly detection
particular to the Bitcoin transaction network. Our goal is to detect which
users and transactions are the most suspicious; in this case, anomalous
behavior is a proxy for suspicious behavior. To this end, we use three
unsupervised learning methods including k-means clustering, Mahalanobis
distance, and Unsupervised Support Vector Machine (SVM) on two graphs generated
by the Bitcoin transaction network: one graph has users as nodes, and the other
has transactions as nodes.
