Using a hybrid content-based and behaviour-based featuring approach in a parallel environment to detect fake reviews

The financial impact of positive reviews has prompted some fraudulent sellers to generate fake product reviews for either promoting their products or discrediting competing products. Many e-commerce portals have implemented measures to detect such fake reviews, and these measures require excellent detectors to be effective. In this work, we propose 133 unique features from the combination of content and behaviour-based features to detect fake reviews using machine learning classifiers. Preliminary results show that these features can provide good results for all datasets tested. Detailed analysis of the results, however, reveals the existence of class imbalance issues for two of the bigger datasets - there is a high imbalance between the accuracies of different classes (e.g., 7.73% for the fake class and 99.3% for the genuine class using a Multilayer Perceptron classifier). We therefore introduce two sampling methods that can improve the accuracy of the fake review class on balanced datasets. The accuracies can be improved to a maximum of 89% for both random under and oversampling on Convolutional Neural Networks. Additionally, we propose a parallel cross-validation method that can speed up the validation process in a parallel environment.