Autoencoder Neural Network for Detecting Non-human Web Traffic

Abstract

In this paper, a neural network model is presented to identify fraudulent visits to a website, which are significantly different from visits of human users. Such unusual visits are most often made by automated software, i.e. bots. Bots are used to perform advertising scams or to do scraping, i.e., automatic scanning of website content frequently not in line with the intentions of website authors. The model proposed in this paper works on data extracted directly from a web browser when a user or a bot visits a website. This data is acquired by way of using JavaScript. When bots appear on the website, collected parameter values are significantly different from the values collected during usual visits made by human website users. However, just knowing what values these parameters have is simply not enough to identify bots as they are being constantly modified and new values that have not yet been accounted for appear. Thus, it is not possible to know all the data generated by bots. Therefore, this paper proposes a neural network with an autoencoder structure that makes it possible to detect deviations in parameter values that depart from the learned data from usual users. This enables detection of anomalies, i.e., data generated by bots. The effectiveness of the presented model is demonstrated on authentic data extracted from several online stores.