Spatio-Temporal Graph Representation Learning for Fraudster Group Detection

TL;DR

This paper introduces a spatio-temporal graph learning framework combining HIN-RNN, RNN, and GCN to detect fraudster groups by modeling dynamic co-review relations, outperforming existing methods on Yelp and Amazon datasets.

Contribution

The work presents a novel spatio-temporal graph representation learning approach that captures reviewer dynamics and outlier detection for fraud group identification.

Findings

Achieved up to 12% improvement in F1-score over recent methods.

Effectively models reviewer collaboration over time.

Reduces false positives by removing outlier reviewers.

Abstract

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.