Finding Needles in Heterogeneous Haystacks

Abstract

Due to intense competition and lack of real estate on the front page of large e-commerce platforms, sellers are sometimes motivated to garner non-genuine signals (clicks, add-to-carts, purchases) on their products, to make them appear more appealing to customers. This hurts customers' trust on the platform, and also hurts genuine sellers who sell their items without looking to game the system. While it is important to find the sellers and the buyers who are colluding to garner these non-genuine signals, doing so is highly nontrivial. Firstly, the set of bad actors in the system is a very small fraction of all the buyers/sellers on the platform. Secondly, bad actors “hide” with the good ones, making them hard to detect. In this paper, we develop CONGCN, a context aware heterogeneous graph convolutional network to detect bad actors on a large heterogeneous graph. While our method is motivated by abuse detection in e-commerce, the method is applicable to other areas such as computational biology and finance, where large heterogeneous graphs are pervasive, and the amount of labeled data is very limited. We train CONGCN via novel sampling methods, and context aware message passing in a semi-supervised fashion to predict dishonest buyers and sellers in e-commerce. Extensive experiments show that our method is effective, beating several baselines; generalizable to an inductive setting and highly scalable.