---
title: "SPNSA (Shortest Paths Network Search Algorithm)"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "concept"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Shortest Paths Network Search Algorithm (SPNSA)"
aliases: ["SPNSA","Shortest Paths Network Search Algorithm"]
first_seen: "2026-10-15T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["feed-guided subgraph extraction","Enron email corpus","Elliptic Bitcoin dataset / IBM-AML benchmark","Pritheega Magalingam","Asha Rao"]
seek_code_commit: "d40ee39"
---


A feed-guided subgraph-extraction method: seed it with a small set of
"known bad" entities (the feed) and it searches outward along shortest
paths to surface a compact, interpretable sub-network connecting them.
Introduced in 2015 to find Enron's convicted money-launderers inside the
Enron e-mail corpus, it was carried eleven years later into financial
anti-money-laundering (AML) research — applied to the Elliptic Bitcoin
graph and the synthetic IBM-AML benchmark family, with a new 2026 paper
proposing better strategies for choosing the feed itself rather than
changing the algorithm. The vault's interest in SPNSA is specifically that
cross-domain migration: a single research lineage, carried by a shared
co-author, moving an investigative tool from one crime domain's dataset to
an entirely different one's.

## References
- [[claim-spnsa-originated-2015-on-enron-email-corpus-not-financial-transactions]]
- [[claim-spnsa-motif-feed-selection-outperforms-baselines-but-not-universally]]
- [[claim-spnsa-illicit-enrichment-gain-traces-to-feed-selection-not-path-aggregation]]