Identifying spammer groups in consumer reviews using meta-data via bipartite graph approach

Abstract

Nowadays, online product reviews are more common on e-commerce platforms. Before making a purchase, people frequently consult product reviews to assess the quality of the item. However, the review system has been seriously harmed by a huge number of review spammers, who frequently cooperate to promote or denigrate specific products. Earlier research uses machine learning techniques to identify singleton suspicious reviews and reviewers without considering the meta-data. In this study, we utilise the meta-data of the consumer’s reviews to identify review spammer organisations using the state-of the-art community detection techniques. Due to the diversity of behavioural indicators, group spammers are challenging to identify. In this study, we propose that clustering the singleton spammers using the meta-data (location and time) of the reviews is the key to identifying group spammers (and their fraudulent reviews). We propose filling out the review-product matrix using the product and review information and text. We then use this to deduce the hidden reviewer-product connections to address the issue of the absence of explicit behavioural signals for singleton reviewers. Subsequently, we build a bipartite graph using the review-product matrix. Using the meta-data of the reviews, which are frequently overlooked by existing algorithms, experiments on a real-world Yelp dataset demonstrated the effectiveness of our methodology in detecting group spammers.