Comparison of machine learning and sentiment analysis in detection of suspicious online reviewers on different type of data

Abstract

The article focuses on solving an important problem of detecting suspicious reviewers in online discussions on social networks. We have concentrated on a special type of suspicious authors, on trolls. We have used methods of machine learning for generation of detection models to discrimi-nate a troll reviewer from a common reviewer, but also methods of sentiment analysis to recognize the sentiment typical for troll’s comments. The sentiment analysis can be provided also using machine learning or lexicon‐based approach. We have used lexicon‐based sentiment analysis for its better abil-ity to detect a dictionary typical for troll authors. We have achieved Accuracy = 0.95 and F1 = 0.80 using sentiment analysis. The best results using machine learning methods were achieved by support vector machine, Accuracy = 0.986 and F1 = 0.988, using a dataset with the set of all selected attributes. We can conclude that detection model based on machine learning is more successful than lexicon‐based sentiment analysis, but the difference in accuracy is not so large as in F1 measure.