Detecting Fake Reviewer Groups in Dynamic Networks: An Adaptive Graph Learning Method
Organizations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Xi’an University of Science and Technology, Xi’an 710600, China · School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an 710021, China · Harbin Engineering University, Harbin, Heilongjiang, China, and also with the School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China
Abstract
The proliferation of fake reviews, often produced by organized groups, undermines consumer trust and fair competition on online platforms. These groups employ sophisticated strategies that evade traditional detection methods, particularly in cold-start scenarios involving newly launched products with sparse data. To address this, we propose the Diversity- and Similarity-aware Dynamic Graph Attention-enhanced Graph Convolutional Network (DS-DGA-GCN), a new graph learning model for detecting fake reviewer groups. DS-DGA-GCN achieves robust detection since it focuses on the joint relationships among products, reviews, and reviewers by modeling product-review-reviewer networks. DS-DGA-GCN also achieves adaptive detection by integrating a Network Feature Scoring (NFS) system and a new dynamic graph attention mechanism. The NFS system quantifies network attributes, including neighbor diversity, network self-similarity, as a unified feature score. The dynamic graph attention mechanism improves the adaptability and computational efficiency by captures features related to temporal information, node importance, and global network structure. Extensive experiments conducted on two real-world datasets derived from Amazon and Xiaohongshu demonstrate that DS-DGA-GCN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving accuracies of up to 89.8% and 88.3%, respectively.
Figures & tables
| Dataset | Number of Reviewers | Number of Reviews | Number of Products |
| Before Preprocessing | 61,357 | 754,256 | 42,127 |
| After Preprocessing | 50,253 | 701,731 | 35,593 |
| Dataset | Platform Type | Data Scale | Data Dynamics | Application Scenario |
| Amazon | E-commerce | 35,593 Products | Low | Fake review detection and product analysis |
| Xiaohongshu | Social Media | 6,993 Videos | High | Fake user behavior and group detection |
| Indicator | Amazon | Xiaohongshu |
| Interaction Arrival Rate ( ) | 0.45 | 0.85 |
| Reviewer Churn ( ) | 0.28 | 0.79 |
| Edge Turnover ( ) | 0.35 | 0.81 |
| Burstiness ( ) | 0.19 | 0.65 |
| Composite Index ( ) | 0.32 | 0.78 |
| Dataset | Class | NFS Mean | NFS Std. Dev. |
| Amazon | Real | 0.55 | 0.15 |
| Fake | 0.85 | 0.10 | |
| Xiaohongshu | Real | 0.48 | 0.18 |
| Fake | 0.82 | 0.14 |
| Step | Time Complexity | Description |
| Node Importance Calculation | denotes the total number of nodes; importance is computed for each node. | |
| Node Sampling | The sampling process scales linearly with the total number of nodes. | |
| Edge Sampling and Reconstruction | represents the number of edges after sampling, significantly smaller than . | |
| Adaptive Node Aggregation | denotes the number of sampled nodes, is the number of clusters, and is the number of iterations. | |
| Overall Complexity | Significantly Reduced | Due to and , the overall computational cost is greatly reduced. |
| Model | Amazon Dataset | Xiaohongshu Dataset | ||||||
| Accuracy | Recall | F1 | AUROC | Accuracy | Recall | F1 | AUROC | |
| No Attention | 0.803 | 0.776 | 0.781 | 0.880 | 0.783 | 0.757 | 0.763 | 0.860 |
| GAT | 0.832 | 0.803 | 0.816 | 0.900 | 0.814 | 0.789 | 0.792 | 0.885 |
| Multi-Head | 0.841 | 0.822 | 0.838 | 0.910 | 0.832 | 0.807 | 0.812 | 0.895 |
| GaAN | 0.854 | 0.832 | 0.848 | 0.918 | 0.841 | 0.822 | 0.834 | 0.904 |
| Self-Attention | 0.865 | 0.842 | 0.851 | 0.926 | 0.857 | 0.834 | 0.848 | 0.912 |
| Model | Small scale group | Middle scale group | Large scale group | |||||||||
| Accuracy | Recall | F1 | AUROC | Accuracy | Recall | F1 | AUROC | Accuracy | Recall | F1 | AUROC | |
| GraphSAGE | 0.713 | 0.688 | 0.698 | 0.775 | 0.782 | 0.754 | 0.765 | 0.835 | 0.859 | 0.829 | 0.841 | 0.895 |
| GAT | 0.696 | 0.683 | 0.673 | 0.765 | 0.763 | 0.749 | 0.738 | 0.825 | 0.839 | 0.823 | 0.811 | 0.875 |
| GCN | 0.717 | 0.711 | 0.730 | 0.785 | 0.786 | 0.780 | 0.800 | 0.845 | 0.864 | 0.857 | 0.879 | 0.915 |
| HetGNN | 0.709 | 0.694 | 0.706 | 0.795 | 0.806 | 0.784 | 0.792 | 0.865 | 0.874 | 0.849 | 0.870 | 0.920 |
| TGN | 0.721 | 0.706 | 0.720 | 0.810 | 0.812 | 0.791 | 0.804 | 0.870 | 0.887 | 0.862 | 0.880 | 0.930 |
| Model | Small scale group | Middle size group | Large scale group | |||||||||
| Accuracy | Recall | F1 | AUROC | Accuracy | Recall | F1 | AUROC | Accuracy | Recall | F1 | AUROC | |
| GraphSAGE | 0.684 | 0.642 | 0.654 | 0.735 | 0.750 | 0.703 | 0.717 | 0.795 | 0.824 | 0.773 | 0.788 | 0.875 |
| GAT | 0.708 | 0.696 | 0.702 | 0.770 | 0.776 | 0.763 | 0.770 | 0.830 | 0.861 | 0.842 | 0.853 | 0.905 |
| GCN | 0.699 | 0.681 | 0.692 | 0.745 | 0.766 | 0.747 | 0.759 | 0.815 | 0.842 | 0.821 | 0.834 | 0.895 |
| HetGNN | 0.706 | 0.690 | 0.701 | 0.760 | 0.774 | 0.756 | 0.767 | 0.840 | 0.868 | 0.847 | 0.862 | 0.915 |
| TGN | 0.713 | 0.702 | 0.709 | 0.790 | 0.790 | 0.772 | 0.780 | 0.865 | 0.875 | 0.854 | 0.868 | 0.935 |
| Train Test | Setting | Accuracy | Recall | F1 | AUROC |
| Amazon Yelp | Zero shot | 0.824 | 0.768 | 0.784 | 0.858 |
| Amazon Yelp | +5% target fine tuning | 0.852 | 0.802 | 0.821 | 0.898 |
| Yelp Amazon | Zero shot | 0.834 | 0.780 | 0.796 | 0.864 |
| Yelp Amazon | +5% target fine tuning | 0.861 | 0.812 | 0.832 | 0.904 |
| Variant | Accuracy | Recall | F1 | AUROC |
| Structure only zero shot | 0.696 | 0.642 | 0.658 | 0.760 |
| Multilingual text embeddings zero shot | 0.714 | 0.658 | 0.676 | 0.792 |
| +5% target fine tuning | 0.748 | 0.700 | 0.724 | 0.842 |
Dynamic Graph Learning
Dynamic graph learning models how networks and their node features change over time to predict links, events, labels, and system behavior.
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