Social Spammer Detection via Convex Nonnegative Matrix Factorization

With the increasing popularity of social network platforms such as Twitter and Sina Weibo, a lot of malicious users, also known as social spammers, disseminate illegal information to normal users. Several approaches are proposed to detect spammers by training a classifier with optimization methods and mainly using content and social following information. Due to the development of spammers’ strategies and the courtesy of some legitimate users, social following information becomes vulnerable to fake by spammers. Meanwhile, the possible social activities and behaviors vary significantly among different users, which leads to a large yet sparse feature space to be modeled by existing approaches. To address issues, in this paper, we propose a new approach named CNMFSD for spammer detection in social networks, which exploits both content information and users interaction relationships in an innovative manner. We have empirically validated the proposed method on a real-world Twitter dataset, and experimental results show that the proposed CNMFSD method improves the detection performance significantly compared with baselines.