Markov-Driven Graph Convolutional Networks for Social Spammer Detection

With the growing popularity of social media, malicious users (spammers) unfairly overpower legitimate users with unwanted or fake content to achieve their illegal purposes, which encourages research on spammer detection. The existing spammer detection methods can be characterized into feature-based detection and propagation-based detection. However, feature-based methods (e.g., GCN) cannot capture the user’s following relations, while propagation-based methods cannot utilize the rich text features. To this end, we consider combining these two methods and propose an Adaptive Reward Markov Random Field (ARMRF) layer. ARMRF layer models three intuitions on user label relations and assign them different learnable rewards. Besides, we learn the reward weights by stacking the ARMRF layer on top of GCN for end-to-end training, and we call the stacked model ARMGCN. To further improve the expressive power of ARMGCN, we propose the Markov-Driven Graph Convolutional Network (MDGCN), which integrates conditional random fields (CRF) and ARMGCN. CRF establishes the label joint probability distribution conditioned features for learning user dependencies, and the distribution can be optimized by a variational EM algorithm. We extensively evaluate the proposed method on two real-world Twitter datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate that MDGCN outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines. In addition, the ARMRF layer is model-independent, so it can be integrated with existing advanced detection methods to improve detection performance further.