Cited by 160Spam and Phishing DetectionMisinformation and Its ImpactsHate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 42 of the 42 references it cites were found in a registry or an index; none of the 23 sources its claims cite is checked for support yet.

Detection of Novel Social Bots by Ensembles of Specialized Classifiers

Open access
Sayyadiharikandeh, Mohsen, Varol, Onur, Yang, Kai-Cheng, Flammini, Alessandro, Menczer, Filippo·2020·Proceedings of the 29th ACM International Conference on Information & Knowledge Management

Abstract

Malicious actors create inauthentic social media accounts controlled in part by algorithms, known as social bots, to disseminate misinformation and agitate online discussion. While researchers have developed sophisticated methods to detect abuse, novel bots with diverse behaviors evade detection. We show that different types of bots are characterized by different behavioral features. As a result, supervised learning techniques suffer severe performance deterioration when attempting to detect behaviors not observed in the training data. Moreover, tuning these models to recognize novel bots requires retraining with a significant amount of new annotations, which are expensive to obtain. To address these issues, we propose a new supervised learning method that trains classifiers specialized for each class of bots and combines their decisions through the maximum rule. The ensemble of specialized classifiers (ESC) can better generalize, leading to an average improvement of 56% in F1 score for unseen accounts across datasets. Furthermore, novel bot behaviors are learned with fewer labeled examples during retraining. We deployed ESC in the newest version of Botometer, a popular tool to detect social bots in the wild, with a cross-validation AUC of 0.99.

Overview

AI snapshot

Written from the paper’s full text.

TL;DR

The paper proposes an Ensemble of Specialized Classifiers (ESC) that trains separate Random Forest classifiers for different bot classes and combines them via the maximum rule to improve detection of novel social bots. ESC improves cross-domain bot recall and F1 over Botometer-v3 and is deployed in Botometer v4 with a cross-validation AUC of 0.99.

Key findings

  • ESC improves cross-domain performance on unseen accounts: across six datasets, recall rises from 42% to 84%, precision from 52% to 64%, and F1 from 47% to 73%, an average F1 improvement of 56%. On combined-test, recall goes from 77% to 86%, precision stays at 70%, and F1 rises from 73% to 77% (5% improvement).
  • In-domain performance is maintained: ESC achieves 0.96 AUC under 5-fold cross-validation, similar to Botometer’s 0.97 AUC, and the deployed Botometer v4 model yields a cross-validation AUC of 0.99.
  • Different bot classes rely on different informative features: in cresci-17, traditional spambots are best separated by adjective-frequency standard deviation, social spambots by tweet sentiment arousal entropy, and fake followers by maximum friend-follower ratio.
  • ESC adapts faster to new domains: when adding labeled examples from a held-out domain, ESC learns through a newly added specialized classifier while preserving old classifiers, requiring fewer labeled examples than retraining Botometer-v3 from scratch.

Methods

  • The study uses labeled bot/human datasets from the Bot Repository plus datasets from Rauchfleisch and Kaiser, extracting over 1,200 features in six categories: metadata, retweet/mention networks, temporal features, content, and sentiment.
  • ESC combines a human-detection classifier (RF0, corresponding to Botometer) with specialized Random Forest classifiers trained on balanced bot classes and human examples; bot scores are aggregated with the maximum rule, with Platt scaling in experiments.
  • Evaluation includes 5-fold cross-validation for in-domain performance and hold-out cross-domain tests on cresci-stock, gilani-17, cresci-rtbust, kaiser-1, kaiser-2, kaiser-3, and combined-test, using F1 and AUC with bootstrap confidence intervals; adaptation is tested on varol-icwsm.

Limitations

  • The paper states that cross-domain performance is highly sensitive to the datasets used in training and testing, making it easy to cherry-pick examples that make any method look bad; kaiser-1 and kaiser-3 are not completely hold-out because they include botwiki bots from ESC training, kaiser-3 shares accounts with kaiser-2 and kaiser-1, and kaiser-2 has only 27 bot accounts, making F1 sensitive to class imbalance.
  • The paper notes that tweetbotornot2 uses a “verified” profile feature and tends to assign low bot scores to verified accounts, biasing comparisons in its favor on datasets where many human-labeled accounts are verified.
  • The text makes evident that ground-truth labels can become invalid over time as accounts change, become inactive, or are compromised; the manual inspection of suspected mislabeled accounts covered only a random sample of 50 out of 332 highlighted accounts.

Model-written summary. Check it against the paper before relying on it.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1145/3340531.3412698

Cites

42 of 42 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

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Claims the paper makes

21 Own result · 18 Not checked yet · 16 No basis given · 14 Own interpretation · 3 Own method

Verify all 23 references — free account
  • The quote only partly states this claim. 3
  • It may state two separate claims as one. 29
  • Probably not a substantial claim. 24
48 of 48
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    High-quality datasets of annotated social media accounts are expensive to acquire.

    “Unfortunately, high-quality datasets of annotated social media accounts are expensive to acquire.”
  • The authors state this as an assumption.

    The datasets from Rauchfleisch and Kaiser assume that all accounts belonging to American and German politicians are human accounts.

    “These datasets made an assumption that all accounts belonging to American and German politicians are human accounts.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Real-world applications of social bot detection always face the challenge of recognizing novel behaviors that are not represented in the training data.

    “Real-world applications of social bot detection always face the challenge of recognizing novel behaviors that are not represented in the training data.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Periodic retraining to include newly annotated datasets helps systems adapt to unseen examples.

    “Periodic retraining to include newly annotated datasets helps systems adapt to these unseen examples.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    A common approach is to train a new classifier from scratch including both old and new training data, which may not be efficient.

    “A common approach is to train a new classifier from scratch including both old and new training data, which may not be efficient.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The F1 score is sensitive to class imbalance.

    “the F1 score is sensitive to this class imbalance”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The AUC metric is not sensitive to class imbalance.

    “the AUC metric, which is not sensitive to class imbalance”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The decision trees use Gini gain as a feature selection criterion, therefore the number of examples sharing the same informative features affects the selection of those features.

    “The decision trees use Gini gain as a feature selection criterion, therefore the number of examples sharing the same informative features affects the selection of those features.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    No systems have been presented in the literature to automatically identify the type of a bot as the method proposed here.

    “Despite the existence of different types of bots, no systems have been presented in the literature to automatically identify the type of a bot as the method proposed here.”
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Citations

Cites

Show all 34 references

Research works printed but not linked: 9

  1. Jon-Patrick Allem , Emilio Ferrara , Sree Priyanka Uppu , Tess Boley Cruz, and Jennifer B Unger. 2017 . E-cigarette surveillance with social media data: social bots, emerging topics, and trends. JMIR public health and surveillance 3, 4 (2017), e98. Jon-Patrick Allem, Emilio Ferrara, Sree Priyanka Uppu, Tess Boley Cruz, and Jennifer B Unger. 2017. E-cigarette surveillance with social media data: social bots, emerging topics, and trends. JMIR public health and surveillance 3, 4 (2017), e98.
  2. Alessandro Bessi and Emilio Ferrara . 2016. Social bots distort the 2016 US Presidential election online discussion. First Monday 21, 11 ( 2016 ). Alessandro Bessi and Emilio Ferrara. 2016. Social bots distort the 2016 US Presidential election online discussion. First Monday 21, 11 (2016).
  3. Emilio Ferrara . 2017. Disinformation and Social Bot Operations in the Run Up to the 2017 French Presidential Election. First Monday 22, 8 ( 2017 ). Emilio Ferrara. 2017. Disinformation and Social Bot Operations in the Run Up to the 2017 French Presidential Election. First Monday 22, 8 (2017).
  4. Kyumin Lee , Brian David Eoff , and James Caverlee . 2011 . Seven Months with the Devils: A Long-Term Study of Content Polluters on Twitter . In Proc. AAAI Intl. Conf. on Web and Social Media (ICWSM). Kyumin Lee, Brian David Eoff, and James Caverlee. 2011. Seven Months with the Devils: A Long-Term Study of Content Polluters on Twitter. In Proc. AAAI Intl. Conf. on Web and Social Media (ICWSM).
  5. Fabian Pedregosa , Gaël Varoquaux , Alexandre Gramfort , Vincent Michel , Bertrand Thirion , Olivier Grisel , Mathieu Blondel , Peter Prettenhofer , Ron Weiss , Vincent Dubourg , 2011 . Scikit-learn: Machine learning in Python. the Journal of machine Learning research 12 (2011), 2825--2830. Fabian Pedregosa, Gaël Varoquaux, Alexandre Gramfort, Vincent Michel, Bertrand Thirion, Olivier Grisel, Mathieu Blondel, Peter Prettenhofer, Ron Weiss, Vincent Dubourg, et al. 2011. Scikit-learn: Machine learning in Python. the Journal of machine Learning research 12 (2011), 2825--2830.
  6. Chengcheng Shao , Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia , Onur Varol, Kai-Cheng Yang, Alessandro Flammini, and Filippo Menczer. 2018 . The spread of low-credibility content by social bots. Nature communications 9, 1 (2018), 4787. Chengcheng Shao, Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, Onur Varol, Kai-Cheng Yang, Alessandro Flammini, and Filippo Menczer. 2018. The spread of low-credibility content by social bots. Nature communications 9, 1 (2018), 4787.
  7. Galen Stoking and Nami Sumida . 2018. Social Media Bots Draw Public?s Attention and Concern . Pew Research Center ( 15 Oct 2018 ). https://www.journalism.org/2018/10/15/social-media-bots-draw-publics-attention-and-concern/ Galen Stoking and Nami Sumida. 2018. Social Media Bots Draw Public?s Attention and Concern. Pew Research Center (15 Oct 2018). https://www.journalism.org/2018/10/15/social-media-bots-draw-publics-attention-and-concern/
  8. Onur Varol , Clayton A Davis , Filippo Menczer , and Alessandro Flammini . 2018. Feature Engineering for Social Bot Detection. Feature Engineering for Machine Learning and Data Analytics ( 2018 ), 311--334. Onur Varol, Clayton A Davis, Filippo Menczer, and Alessandro Flammini. 2018. Feature Engineering for Social Bot Detection. Feature Engineering for Machine Learning and Data Analytics (2018), 311--334.
  9. Onur Varol and Ismail Uluturk . 2018. Deception strategies and threats for online discussions. First Monday 23, 5 ( 2018 ). Onur Varol and Ismail Uluturk. 2018. Deception strategies and threats for online discussions. First Monday 23, 5 (2018).

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Metadata

Authors
Sayyadiharikandeh, M., Varol, O., Yang, K.-C., Flammini, A., & Menczer, F.
Affiliations
  • Indiana University Bloomington (US)
  • Sabancı Üniversitesi (TR)
Venue
Proceedings of the 29th ACM International Conference on Information & Knowledge Management
Publisher
ACM
Published
2020-10-19
Pages
2725-2732
ISSN
2155-0751 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W3035082952
Cited by
159
References
34
Citations by year
2026: 9 · 2025: 26 · 2024: 36 · 2023: 45 · 2022: 30 · 2021: 10 · 2020: 3
FWCI
16.69
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
  • Craig Newmark Philanthropies
  • Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (W911NF-17-C0094)
  • John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Spam and Phishing Detection
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection
Keywords
social bot detection, generalization to unseen classes, Botometer, misinformation

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