An unsupervised method for social network spammer detection based on user information interests

Abstract

Online Social Networks (OSNs) are a popular platform for communication and collaboration. Spammers are highly active in OSNs. Uncovering spammers has become one of the most challenging problems in OSNs. Classification-based supervised approaches are the most commonly used method for detecting spammers. Classification-based systems suffer from limitations of “data labelling”, “spam drift”, “imbalanced datasets” and “data fabrication”. These limitations effect the accuracy of a classifier’s detection. An unsupervised approach does not require labelled datasets. We aim to address the limitation of data labelling and spam drifting through an unsupervised approach.We present a pure unsupervised approach for spammer detection based on the peer acceptance of a user in a social network to distinguish spammers from genuine users. The peer acceptance of a user to another user is calculated based on common shared interests over multiple shared topics between the two users. The main contribution of this paper is the introduction of a pure unsupervised spammer detection approach based on users’ peer acceptance. Our approach does not require labelled training datasets. While it does not better the accuracy of supervised classification-based approaches, our approach has become a successful alternative for traditional classifiers for spam detection by achieving an accuracy of 96.9%.