Detecting collusive spammers with heterogeneous graph attention network

Abstract

Detecting collusive spammers who collaboratively post fake reviews is extremely important to guarantee the reliability of review information on e-commerce platforms. In this research, we formulate the collusive spammer detection as an anomaly detection problem and propose a novel detection approach based on heterogeneous graph attention network. First, we analyze the review dataset from different perspectives and use the statistical distribution to model each user's review behavior. By introducing the Bhattacharyya distance, we calculate the user-user and product-product correlation degrees to construct a multi-relation heterogeneous graph. Second, we combine the biased random walk strategy and multi-head self-attention mechanism to propose a model of heterogeneous graph attention network to learn the node embeddings from the multi-relation heterogeneous graph. Finally, we propose an improved community detection algorithm to acquire candidate spamming groups and employ an anomaly detection model based on the autoencoder to identify collusive spammers. Experiments show that the average improvements of precision@k and recall@k of the proposed approach over the best baseline method on the Amazon, Yelp_Miami, Yelp_New York, Yelp_San Francisco, and YelpChi datasets are [13%, 3%], [32%, 12%], [37%, 7%], [42%, 10%], and [18%, 1%], respectively.