Ensemble Classifiers Employed for Spam Review Detection

The advancement of technology and the use of internet have changed many aspects of human culture over the years. Today, consumers take confidence in e-commerce platforms like amazon and eBay for comprehensive understanding of products and services when making a purchase decision. Here the web or user-generated content from consumers of such products and services, known as reviews, are exploited by spam reviewers to falsely promote or downgrade some targeted products. Despite potential solutions, Identifying and preventing review spam are still one of the top challenges faced by web search engines today. Therefore, in the quest to provide a more improved and efficient classification of review spam, this research probed different techniques in order to find most effective solution to spam detection. The research employed three base classifiers, Naïve Bayes, Support Vector Machines and Logistic Regression to form ensemble classifiers complimented with Arching classifier. The Arching classifier performs the weighted voting that produces the final class label with performance and accuracy higher than either of the individual base classifiers. Cross-validation is used as evaluation metrics to measure the performance or effectiveness of the ensemble classifiers while the experimental results shows that the ensemble classifiers achieve the best results compared to the single based classifier in terms of Precision, Recall, F1-measure and Accuracy.