An Inferable Representation Learning for Fraud Review Detection with Cold-start Problem

Abstract

Fraud review significantly damages the business reputation and also customers’ trust to certain products. It has become a serious problem existing on the current social media. Various efforts have been put in to tackle such problems. However, in the case of cold-start where a review is posted by a new user who just pops up on the social media, common fraud detection methods may fail because most of them are heavily depended on the information about the user’s historical behavior and its social relation to other users, yet such information is lacking in the cold-start case. This paper presents a novel Joint-bEhavior-and-Social-relaTion-infERable (JESTER) embedding method to leverage the user reviewing behavior and social relations for cold-start fraud review detection. JESTER embeds the deep characteristics of existing user behavior and social relations of users and items in an inferable user-item-review-rating representation space where the representation of a new user can be efficiently inferred by a closed-form solution and reflects the user’s most probable behavior and social relations. Thus, a cold-start fraud review can be effectively detected accordingly. Our experiments show JESTER (i) performs significantly better in detecting fraud reviews on four real-life social media data sets, and (ii) effectively infers new user representation in the cold-start problem, compared to three state-of-the-art and two baseline competitors.