A Behavior-Driven Forum Spammer Recognition Method with Its Application in Automobile Forums

Abstract

Forum comments are valuable information for enterprises to discover public preferences and market trends. However, extensive marketing and malicious attack behaviors in forums are always an obstacle for enterprises to make effective use of this information. And these forum spammers are constantly updating technology to prevent detection. Therefore, how to accurately recognize forum spammers has become an important issue. Aiming to accurately recognize forum spammers, this paper changes the research target from understanding abnormal reviews and the suspicious relationship among forum spammers to discover how they must behave (follow or be followed) to achieve their monetary goals. First, we classify forum spammers into automated forum spammers and marketing forum spammers based on different behavioral features. Then, we propose a support vector machine-based automated spammer recognition (ASR) model and a k-means clustering-based marketing spammer recognition (MSR) model. The experimental results on the real-world labelled dataset illustrate the effectiveness of our methods on classification spammer from common users. To the best of our knowledge, this work is among the first to construct behavior-driven recognition models according to the different behavioral patterns of forum spammers.