Spatio-Temporal Graph Representation Learning for Fraudster Group Detection
This work addresses the problem of online review fraud detection for e-commerce platforms and consumers, offering an incremental improvement by incorporating temporal dynamics to better identify fraudster groups.
The paper tackled the problem of detecting fraudster groups writing fake reviews by addressing the limitation of static network models that overlook temporal dynamics and outlier reviewers. The proposed spatio-temporal graph representation learning method achieved improvements of up to 12% in precision, recall, and F1-value over recent approaches on Yelp and Amazon datasets.
Motivated by potential financial gain, companies may hire fraudster groups to write fake reviews to either demote competitors or promote their own businesses. Such groups are considerably more successful in misleading customers, as people are more likely to be influenced by the opinion of a large group. To detect such groups, a common model is to represent fraudster groups' static networks, consequently overlooking the longitudinal behavior of a reviewer thus the dynamics of co-review relations among reviewers in a group. Hence, these approaches are incapable of excluding outlier reviewers, which are fraudsters intentionally camouflaging themselves in a group and genuine reviewers happen to co-review in fraudster groups. To address this issue, in this work, we propose to first capitalize on the effectiveness of the HIN-RNN in both reviewers' representation learning while capturing the collaboration between reviewers, we first utilize the HIN-RNN to model the co-review relations of reviewers in a group in a fixed time window of 28 days. We refer to this as spatial relation learning representation to signify the generalisability of this work to other networked scenarios. Then we use an RNN on the spatial relations to predict the spatio-temporal relations of reviewers in the group. In the third step, a Graph Convolution Network (GCN) refines the reviewers' vector representations using these predicted relations. These refined representations are then used to remove outlier reviewers. The average of the remaining reviewers' representation is then fed to a simple fully connected layer to predict if the group is a fraudster group or not. Exhaustive experiments of the proposed approach showed a 5% (4%), 12% (5%), 12% (5%) improvement over three of the most recent approaches on precision, recall, and F1-value over the Yelp (Amazon) dataset, respectively.