Spammer detection using multi-classifier information fusion based on evidential reasoning rule

Spammer detection is essentially a process of judging the authenticity of users, and thus can be regarded as a classification problem. In order to improve the classification performance, multi-classifier information fusion is usually used to realize the automatic detection of spammers by utilizing the information from multiple classifiers. However, the existing fusion strategies do not reasonably take the uncertainty from the results of different classifiers (views) into account, and the relative importance and reliability of each classifier are not strictly distinguished. Therefore, in order to detect spammers effectively, this paper develops a novel multi-classifier information fusion model based on the evidential reasoning (ER) rule. Firstly, according to the user's characterization strategy, the base classifiers are constructed through the profile-based, content-based and behavior-based. Then, the idea of multi-classifier fusion is combined with the ER rule, and the results of base classifiers are aggregated by considering their weights and reliabilities. Extensive experimental results on the real-world dataset verify the effectiveness of the proposed model.