Online modeling of proactive moderation system for auction fraud detection

Abstract

We consider the problem of building online machine-learned models for detecting auction frauds in e-commence web sites. Since the emergence of the world wide web, online shopping and online auction have gained more and more popularity. While people are enjoying the benefits from online trading, criminals are also taking advantages to conduct fraudulent activities against honest parties to obtain illegal profit. Hence proactive fraud-detection moderation systems are commonly applied in practice to detect and prevent such illegal and fraud activities. Machine-learned models, especially those that are learned online, are able to catch frauds more efficiently and quickly than human-tuned rule-based systems. In this paper, we propose an online probit model framework which takes online feature selection, coefficient bounds from human knowledge and multiple instance learning into account simultaneously. By empirical experiments on a real-world online auction fraud detection data we show that this model can potentially detect more frauds and significantly reduce customer complaints compared to several baseline models and the human-tuned rule-based system.