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Article
SpADe: Multi-Stage Spam Account Detection for Online Social Networks
IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing
  • Federico Concone
  • Giuseppe Lo Re
  • Marco Morana
  • Sajal K. Das, Missouri University of Science and Technology
Abstract

In recent years, Online Social Networks (OSNs) have radically changed the way people communicate. The most widely used platforms, such as Facebook, Youtube, and Instagram, claim more than one billion monthly active users each. Beyond these, news-oriented micro-blogging services, e.g., Twitter, are daily accessed by more than 120 million users sharing contents from all over the world. Unfortunately, legitimate users of the OSNs are mixed with malicious ones, which are interested in spreading unwanted, misleading, harmful, or discriminatory content. Spam detection in OSNs is generally approached by considering the characteristics of the account under analysis, its connection with the rest of the network, as well as data and metadata representing the content shared. However, obtaining all this information can be computationally expensive, or even unfeasible, on massive networks. Driven by these motivations, in this paper we propose SpADe, a multi-stage Spam Account Detection algorithm with reject option, whose purpose is to exploit less costly features at the early stages, while progressively extracting more complex information only for those accounts that are difficult to classify. Experimental evaluation shows the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm compared to single-stage approaches, which are much more complex in terms of features processing and classification time.

Department(s)
Computer Science
Keywords and Phrases
  • Artificial Intelligence,
  • Behavioral Sciences,
  • Blogs,
  • Detection Algorithms,
  • Feature Extraction,
  • Social Network Security,
  • Social Networking (Online),
  • Spam Detection,
  • Unsolicited E-Mail,
  • Video on Demand
Document Type
Article - Journal
Document Version
Citation
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2022 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, All rights reserved.
Publication Date
1-1-2022
Publication Date
01 Jan 2022
Disciplines
Citation Information
Federico Concone, Giuseppe Lo Re, Marco Morana and Sajal K. Das. "SpADe: Multi-Stage Spam Account Detection for Online Social Networks" IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (2022) ISSN: 1941-0018; 1545-5971
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/sajal-das/261/