Review Spammer Detection

This package provides an implementation of Review Spammer Detection (RSD) introduced in this paper:

• Guan Wang, Sihong Xie, Bing Liu, and Philip S. Yu, “Review Graph Based Online Store Review Spammer Detection,” Proc. of IEEE 11th International Conference on Data Mining, 2011, pp. 1242-1247.

This package is a part of Review Graph Mining Project which provides other algorithms and datasets.

Installation

Use pip to install this package.

pip install --upgrade rgmining-rsd

Graph model

We assume review data are represented in a bipartite graph. This bipartite graph has two kinds of nodes; reviewers and products. One reviewer node and one product node are connected if the reviewer posts a review to the product. In other words, an edge in the graph represents a review. Each review has a rating score. We assume the score is normalized in 0 to 1.

Here is a sample of the bipartite graph.

Usage

Construct a graph

In order to run the Fraud Eagle algorithm, you need to create a bipartite graph which represents your review data. The graph constructor is rsd.ReviewGraph(), which is an alias of rsd.graph.ReviewGraph. It takes a parameter theta. See the original article Review Graph Based Online Store Review Spammer Detection for more details about this parameter.

You can instance the bipartite graph by

import rsd
graph = rsd.ReviewGraph(theta)

Then, you need to add reviewer nodes, product nodes, and review edges. new_reviewer() and new_product() methods of the graph create a reviewer node and a product node, respectively, and add them to the graph. Both methods take one argument name, i.e. ID of the node. Note that, the names must be unique in a graph.

add_review() method add a review to the graph. It takes a reviewer, a product, and a normalized rating score which the reviewer posted to the product. The normalized rating scores mean they must be in 0 to 1.

For example, let us assume there are two reviewers and three products like the below.

The graph can be constructed by the following code.

# Create reviewers and products.
reviewers = [graph.new_reviewer(f"reviewer-{i}") for i in range(2)]
products = [graph.new_product(f"product-{i}") for i in range(3)]
graph.add_review(reviewers[0], products[0], 0.2)
graph.add_review(reviewers[0], products[1], 0.9)
graph.add_review(reviewers[0], products[2], 0.6)
graph.add_review(reviewers[1], products[0], 0.1)
graph.add_review(reviewers[1], products[1], 0.7)

Analysis

update() runs one iteration. This method returns the amount of update in the iteration. You need to run iterations until the amount of update becomes enough small. It’s depended to the review data and the parameter epsilon that how many iterations are required to the amount of update becomes small. Moreover, sometimes it won’t be converged. Thus, you should set some limitation to the iterations.

print("Start iterations.")
max_iteration = 10000
for i in range(max_iteration):

   # Run one iteration.
   diff = graph.update()
   print(f"Iteration {i + 1} ends. (diff={diff})")

   if diff < 10**-5: # Set 10^-5 as an acceptable small number.
       break

Result

Each reviewer has an anomalous score which representing how the reviewer is anomalous. The score is normalized in 0 to 1. To obtain that score, use anomalous_score property.

The ReviewGraph has reviewers property, which returns a collection of reviewers the graph has. Thus, the following code outputs all reviewers’ anomalous score.

for r in graph.reviewers:
    print(r.name, r.anomalous_score)

On the other hand, each product has a summarized ratings computed from all reviews posted to the product according to each reviewers’ anomalous score. The summarized ratings are also normalized in 0 to 1. summary property returns such summarized rating.

The ReviewGraph also has products property, which returns a collection of products. Thus, the following code outputs all products’ summarized ratings.

for p in graph.products:
    print(p.name, p.summary)

API Reference

• rsd package
  • ReviewGraph
  • Submodules
  • rsd.graph module

Indices and tables

• Index

• Module Index

• Search Page

License

This software is released under The GNU General Public License Version 3, see COPYING for more detail.