Spam profiles detection on social networks using computational intelligence methods: The effect of the lingual context

Abstract

In online social networks, spam profiles represent one of the most serious security threats over the Internet; if they do not stop producing bad advertisements, they can be exploited by criminals for various purposes. This article addresses the nature and the characteristics of spam profiles in a social network like Twitter to improve spam detection, based on a number of publicly available language-independent features. In order to investigate the effectiveness of these features in spam detection, four datasets are extracted for four different language contexts (i.e. Arabic, English, Korean and Spanish), and a fifth is formed by combining them all. We conduct our experiments using a set of five well-known classification algorithms in spam detection field, k-Nearest Neighbours (k-NN), Random Forest (RF), Naive Bayes (NB), Decision Tree (DT) (J48) and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) classifiers, along with five filter-based feature selection methods, namely, Information Gain, Chi-square, ReliefF, Correlation and Significance. The results show oscillating performance of each classifier across all datasets, but improved classification results with feature selection. In addition, detailed analysis and comparisons are carried out on two different levels: in the first level, we compare the selected features’ importance among the feature selection methods, whereas in the second level, we observe the relations and the importance of the selected features across all datasets. The findings of this article lead to a better understanding of social spam and improving detection methods by considering the various important features resulting from the different lingual contexts.