Jian Chen

Shuhao Shi, Kai Qiao, Jian Chen et al.

The development of social media user stance detection and bot detection methods rely heavily on large-scale and high-quality benchmarks. However, in addition to low annotation quality, existing benchmarks generally have incomplete user relationships, suppressing graph-based account detection research. To address these issues, we propose a Multi-Relational Graph-Based Twitter Account Detection Benchmark (MGTAB), the first standardized graph-based benchmark for account detection. To our knowledge, MGTAB was built based on the largest original data in the field, with over 1.55 million users and 130 million tweets. MGTAB contains 10,199 expert-annotated users and 7 types of relationships, ensuring high-quality annotation and diversified relations. In MGTAB, we extracted the 20 user property features with the greatest information gain and user tweet features as the user features. In addition, we performed a thorough evaluation of MGTAB and other public datasets. Our experiments found that graph-based approaches are generally more effective than feature-based approaches and perform better when introducing multiple relations. By analyzing experiment results, we identify effective approaches for account detection and provide potential future research directions in this field. Our benchmark and standardized evaluation procedures are freely available at: https://github.com/GraphDetec/MGTAB.

Shuhao Shi, Kai Qiao, Jie Yang et al.

The presence of a large number of bots on social media leads to adverse effects. Although Random forest algorithm is widely used in bot detection and can significantly enhance the performance of weak classifiers, it cannot utilize the interaction between accounts. This paper proposes a Random Forest boosted Graph Neural Network for social bot detection, called RF-GNN, which employs graph neural networks (GNNs) as the base classifiers to construct a random forest, effectively combining the advantages of ensemble learning and GNNs to improve the accuracy and robustness of the model. Specifically, different subgraphs are constructed as different training sets through node sampling, feature selection, and edge dropout. Then, GNN base classifiers are trained using various subgraphs, and the remaining features are used for training Fully Connected Netural Network (FCN). The outputs of GNN and FCN are aligned in each branch. Finally, the outputs of all branches are aggregated to produce the final result. Moreover, RF-GNN is compatible with various widely-used GNNs for node classification. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method obtains better performance than other state-of-the-art methods.

S. Shi, Kai Qiao, Shuai Yang et al.

The Graph Neural Network (GNN) has been widely used for graph data representation. However, the existing researches only consider the ideal balanced dataset, and the imbalanced dataset is rarely considered. Traditional methods such as resampling, reweighting, and synthetic samples that deal with imbalanced datasets are no longer applicable in GNN. This paper proposes an ensemble model called Boosting-GNN, which uses GNNs as the base classifiers during boosting. In Boosting-GNN, higher weights are set for the training samples that are not correctly classified by the previous classifier, thus achieving higher classification accuracy and better reliability. Besides, transfer learning is used to reduce computational cost and increase fitting ability. Experimental results indicate that the proposed Boosting-GNN model achieves better performance than GCN, GraphSAGE, GAT, SGC, N-GCN, and most advanced reweighting and resampling methods on synthetic imbalanced datasets, with an average performance improvement of 4.5%