Spammer Group Detection Using Machine Learning Technology for Observation of New Spammer Behavioral Features

Recently, the rapid growth in the number of customer reviews on e-commence platforms and in the amount of user-generated content has begun to have a profound impact on customer purchasing decisions. To counter the negative impact of social media marketing, some firms have begun hiring people to generate fake reviews which either promote their own products or damage their competitor's reputation. This study proposes a framework, which takes advantage of both supervised and unsupervised learning techniques, for the observation of behaviors among spammers. Then, based on the behavior of participants on web forums, the authors build up a post-reply network. The main focus is on the behavior-related features of the reviews, their propagation, and their popularity. The primary objective of this study is to build an effective online spammer detection model and the method detailed in this work can be used to improve the performance of spammer detection models. An experiment is carried out with a real dataset, the results of which indicate that these new features are important for identifying spammers. Finally, random walk clustering is applied to investigate the post-reply network. Some interesting and important features are observed in the interactions between a group of spammers which could be subjected to further research.