A framework for fake review detection in online consumer electronics retailers

Abstract

The impact of online reviews on businesses has grown significantly during last years, being crucial to determine business success in a wide array of sectors, ranging from restaurants, hotels to e-commerce. Unfortunately, some users use unethical means to improve their online reputation by writing fake reviews of their businesses or competitors. Previous research has addressed fake review detection in a number of domains, such as product or business reviews in restaurants and hotels. However, in spite of its economical interest, the domain of consumer electronics businesses has not yet been thoroughly studied. This article proposes a feature framework for detecting fake reviews that has been evaluated in the consumer electronics domain. The contributions are fourfold: (i) Construction of a dataset for classifying fake reviews in the consumer electronics domain in four different cities based on scraping techniques; (ii) definition of a feature framework for fake review detection; (iii) development of a fake review classification method based on the proposed framework and (iv) evaluation and analysis of the results for each of the cities under study. We have reached an 82% F-Score on the classification task and the Ada Boost classifier has been proven to be the best one by statistical means according to the Friedman test.