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Statistical Comparison of Opinion Spam Detectors in Social Media with Imbalanced Datasets

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Abstract

Sentiment analysis is a growing research area that analyzes people’s opinions towards a specific target using posts shared in social media. However, spammers can inject false opinions to change sentiment-oriented decisions, e.g. low quality products or policies can be promoted or advocated over others. Therefore, identifying and removing spam posts in social media is a crucial data cleaning operation for text mining tasks including sentiment analysis. An inherent problem related to spam detection is the imbalanced-class problem. In this paper, we explore the impact of imbalance ratio on the performance of Twitter spam detection using multiple approaches of single and ensemble classifiers. Besides ensemble-based learning (Bagging and Random forest), we apply the SMOTE oversampling technique to improve detection performance especially for classifiers sensitive to imbalanced datasets.

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Correspondence to El-Sayed M. El-Alfy .

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El-Alfy, ES.M., Al-Azani, S. (2019). Statistical Comparison of Opinion Spam Detectors in Social Media with Imbalanced Datasets. In: Thampi, S., Madria, S., Wang, G., Rawat, D., Alcaraz Calero, J. (eds) Security in Computing and Communications. SSCC 2018. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 969. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-5826-5_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-5826-5_12

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