A Deceptive Reviews Detection Method Based on Multidimensional Feature Construction and Ensemble Feature Selection

Shudong Li, Guojin Zhong, Yanlin Jin, Xiaobo Wu, Peican Zhu, Zhen Wang

Abstract: Deceptive reviews on social media and e-commerce websites are inflammatory and will significantly affect the judgment and purchase behavior of other users. At present, many researchers build models based on single text features to detect deceptive reviews. However, deceptive reviewers will deliberately imitate the text style of true reviews when writing reviews. At this time, these methods based on text features are not necessarily effective. What’s more, detection performance is limited because the category distribution is likely to be unbalanced in practice. In this work, to address these shortcomings, a deceptive review detection method based on multidimensional feature construction and ensemble feature selection is proposed. Our proposal constructs 3-D features including text feature, reviewer behavior feature, and deceptive score feature. In addition, to alleviate the impact of unbalanced category distribution, a data resampling algorithm is applied which incorporates random under-sampling (RUS) and Borderline-SMOTE algorithm. Furthermore, we integrate the results of different feature selection based on the Chi-square test, Information gain, and XGBoost feature importance. Our method addresses the limitation of single dimension features and can provide useful detection. Experimental results area under the curve (AUC, Macro Average Precision, and weighted F1-score) show that the proposed method performs well in the task of deceptive review detection on two Amazon datasets. Compared with other advanced methods, our method achieves additional performance gains in the case of poor text quality and datasets with unbalanced category distribution.