Think Outside the Dataset

Abstract

While online review services provide a two-way conversation between brands and consumers, malicious actors, including misbehaving businesses, have an equal opportunity to distort the reviews for their own gains. We propose OneReview, a method for locating fraudulent reviews, correlating data from multiple crowd-sourced review sites. Our approach utilizes Change Point Analysis to locate points at which a business' reputation shifts. Inconsistent trends in reviews of the same businesses across multiple websites are used to identify suspicious reviews. We then extract an extensive set of textual and contextual features from these suspicious reviews and employ supervised machine learning to detect fraudulent reviews.