# ColluEagle: Collusive review spammer detection using Markov random fields

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01690 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.01690/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 Nov 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Data Quality in Crowdsourcing and Spamming Behavior Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17582/) (2024)
- [Opinion Spam Detection: A New Approach Using Machine Learning and Network-Based Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13422/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Product reviews are extremely valuable for online shoppers in providing purchase decisions. Driven by immense profit incentives, fraudsters deliberately fabricate untruthful reviews to distort the reputation of online products. As online reviews become more and more important, group spamming, i.e., a team of fraudsters working collaboratively to attack a set of target products, becomes a new fashion. Previous works use review network effects, i.e. the relationships among reviewers, reviews, and products, to detect fake reviews or review spammers, but ignore time effects, which are critical in characterizing group spamming. In this paper, we propose a novel Markov random field (MRF)-based method (ColluEagle) to detect collusive review spammers, as well as review spam campaigns, considering both network effects and time effects. First we identify co-review pairs, a review phenomenon that happens between two reviewers who review a common product in a similar way, and then model reviewers and their co-review pairs as a pairwise-MRF, and use loopy belief propagation to evaluate the suspiciousness of reviewers. We further design a high quality yet easy-to-compute node prior for ColluEagle, through which the review spammer groups can also be subsequently identified. Experiments show that ColluEagle can not only detect collusive spammers with high precision, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art baselines --- FraudEagle and SpEagle, but also identify highly suspicious review spammer campaigns.