Fake review detection system for online E-commerce platforms: A supervised general mixed probability approach

Abstract

Online consumer reviews play an important role in helping consumers judge the quality and authenticity of products on e-commerce platforms. However, the constant presence of fake reviews on these platforms has significantly impacted the operation and development of e-commerce platforms. In this study, we develop a novel supervised probabilistic method to detect fake reviews by utilizing the difference in the distribution of non-fraudulent reviews and that of fake reviews. Specifically, we first derive the univariate distributions of several unique features (linguistic, behavioral, and interrelationship features). We then integrate these distributions into two mixed distributions according to their labels to represent the overall difference between non-fraudulent reviews and fake reviews. Next, we randomly generate synthetic review data points with different labels from the above mixed distributions. Finally, we train a Multilayer Perceptron model by using these synthetic review data to obtain a classifier. We conducted several experiments to test the model using several original real-world review datasets. Numerical results indicated that the proposed supervised method outperformed some well-known sampling models and fake review detection methods, in terms of classification accuracy. Moreover, we extend the proposed method to handle the scenarios with small samples of raw review data. This study contributes to the literature by exploiting the difference in the distribution of non-fraudulent reviews and that of fraudulent reviews, which can improve the accuracy of fake review detection for online platforms.