At present, the existing abnormal event detection models based on deep learning mainly focus on data represented by a vectorial form, which pay little attention to the impact of the internal structure characteristics of feature vector. In addition, a single classifier is difficult to ensure the accuracy of classification. In order to address the above issues, we propose an abnormal event detection hybrid modulation method via feature expectation subgraph calibrating classification in video surveillance scenes in this paper. Our main contribution is to calibrate the classification of a single classifier by constructing feature expectation subgraphs. First, we employ convolutional neural network and long short-term memory models to extract the spatiotemporal features of video frame, and then construct the feature expectation subgraph for each key frame of every video, which could be used to capture the internal sequential and topological relational characteristics of structured feature vector. Second, we project expectation subgraphs on the sparse vector to combine with a support vector classifier to calibrate the results of a linear support vector classifier. Finally, the experiments on a common dataset named UCSDped1 and a coal mining video dataset in comparison with some existing works demonstrate that the performance of the proposed method is better than several the state-of-the-art approaches. INDEX TERMS Abnormal event detection, feature expectation subgraph, calibrating classification, sequential and topological relational characteristics.