A method for improving computing efficiency of a computing device for temporal directed cycle detection in a transaction graph includes preparing the transaction graph based on a plurality of transactions, the transaction graph including nodes indicating transaction origination points and transaction destination points, and edges indicating interactions between the nodes. Irrelevant nodes in the transaction graph are identified and pruned to provide a pruned, preprocessed transaction graph which can be partitioning into sections, where each section includes selected nodes that are linked to other linked nodes therein. Each of the sections having non-cyclic nodes can be trimmed prior to performing cycle detection on the resulting pruned transaction graph. Postprocessing pruning can be performed to further reduce the number of detected cycles that may be of interest to a particular application, such as in anti-money laundering.