How do they detect spammers?
Extract features from the LDA model and use them in a binary classification task
Spammer detection on social network is a challenging problem. The rigid anti-spam rules have resulted in emergence of"smart"spammers. They resemble legitimate users who are difficult to identify. In this paper, we present a novel spammer classification approach based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation(LDA), a topic model. Our approach extracts both the local and the global information of topic distribution patterns, which capture the essence of spamming. Tested on one benchmark dataset and one self-collected dataset, our proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in terms of averaged F1-score.
Microblogging such as Twitter and Weibo is a popular social networking service, which allows users to post messages up to 140 characters. There are millions of active users on the platform who stay connected with friends. Unfortunately, spammers also use it as a tool to post malicious links, send unsolicited messages to legitimate users, etc. A certain amount of spammers could sway the public opinion and cause distrust of the social platform. Despite the use of rigid anti-spam rules, human-like spammers whose homepages having photos, detailed profiles etc. have emerged. Unlike previous "simple" spammers, whose tweets contain only malicious links, those "smart" spammers are more difficult to distinguish from legitimate users via content-based features alone BIBREF0 . There is a considerable amount of previous work on spammer detection on social platforms. Researcher from Twitter Inc. BIBREF1 collect bot accounts and perform analysis on the user behavior and user profile features. Lee et al. lee2011seven use the so-called social honeypot by alluring social spammers' retweet to build a benchmark dataset, which has been extensively explored in our paper. Some researchers focus on the clustering of urls in tweets and network graph of social spammers BIBREF2 , BIBREF3 , BIBREF4 , BIBREF5 , showing the power of social relationship features.As for content information modeling, BIBREF6 apply improved sparse learning methods. However, few studies have adopted topic-based features. Some researchers BIBREF7 discuss topic characteristics of spamming posts, indicating that spammers are highly likely to dwell on some certain topics such as promotion. But this may not be applicable to the current scenario of smart spammers. In this paper, we propose an efficient feature extraction method. In this method, two new topic-based features are extracted and used to discriminate human-like spammers from legitimate users. We consider the historical tweets of each user as a document and use the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model to compute the topic distribution for each user. Based on the calculated topic probability, two topic-based features, the Local Outlier Standard Score (LOSS) which captures the user's interests on different topics and the Global Outlier Standard Score (GOSS) which reveals the user's interests on specific topic in comparison with other users', are extracted. The two features contain both local and global information, and the combination of them can distinguish human-like spammers effectively. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that features based on topic distributions are used in spammer classification. Experimental results on one public dataset and one self-collected dataset further validate that the two sets of extracted topic-based features get excellent performance on human-like spammer classification problem compared with other state-of-the-art methods. In addition, we build a Weibo dataset, which contains both legitimate users and spammers. To summarize, our major contributions are two-fold: In the following sections, we first propose the topic-based features extraction method in Section 2, and then introduce the two datasets in Section 3. Experimental results are discussed in Section 4, and we conclude the paper in Section 5. Future work is presented in Section 6.