Using a hybrid content-based and behaviour-based featuring approach in a parallel environment to detect fake reviews

Title
Using a hybrid content-based and behaviour-based featuring approach in a parallel environment to detect fake reviews
Publication Date
2021
Author(s)
Satia Budhi, Gregorius
Chiong, Raymond
Wang, Zuly
Dhakal, Sandeep
Type of document
Journal Article
Language
en
Entity Type
Publication
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Place of publication
The Netherlands
DOI
10.1016/j.elerap.2021.101048
UNE publication id
une:1959.11/61396
Abstract

The financial impact of positive reviews has prompted some fraudulent sellers to generate fake product reviews for either promoting their products or discrediting competing products. Many e-commerce portals have implemented measures to detect such fake reviews, and these measures require excellent detectors to be effective. In this work, we propose 133 unique features from the combination of content and behaviour-based features to detect fake reviews using machine learning classifiers. Preliminary results show that these features can provide good results for all datasets tested. Detailed analysis of the results, however, reveals the existence of class imbalance issues for two of the bigger datasets - there is a high imbalance between the accuracies of different classes (e.g., 7.73% for the fake class and 99.3% for the genuine class using a Multilayer Perceptron classifier). We therefore introduce two sampling methods that can improve the accuracy of the fake review class on balanced datasets. The accuracies can be improved to a maximum of 89% for both random under and over-sampling on Convolutional Neural Networks. Additionally, we propose a parallel cross-validation method that can speed up the validation process in a parallel environment.

Link
Citation
Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, v.47
ISSN
1873-7846
1567-4223

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