A novel semi-supervised self-training method based on resampling for Twitter fake account identification

Abstract

Purpose

Twitter fake accounts refer to bot accounts created by third-party organizations to influence public opinion, commercial propaganda or impersonate others. The effective identification of bot accounts is conducive to accurately judge the disseminated information for the public. However, in actual fake account identification, it is expensive and inefficient to manually label Twitter accounts, and the labeled data are usually unbalanced in classes. To this end, the authors propose a novel framework to solve these problems.

Design/methodology/approach

In the proposed framework, the authors introduce the concept of semi-supervised self-training learning and apply it to the real Twitter account data set from Kaggle. Specifically, the authors first train the classifier in the initial small amount of labeled account data, then use the trained classifier to automatically label large-scale unlabeled account data. Next, iteratively select high confidence instances from unlabeled data to expand the labeled data. Finally, an expanded Twitter account training set is obtained. It is worth mentioning that the resampling technique is integrated into the self-training process, and the data class is balanced at the initial stage of the self-training iteration.

Findings

The proposed framework effectively improves labeling efficiency and reduces the influence of class imbalance. It shows excellent identification results on 6 different base classifiers, especially for the initial small-scale labeled Twitter accounts.

Originality/value

This paper provides novel insights in identifying Twitter fake accounts. First, the authors take the lead in introducing a self-training method to automatically label Twitter accounts from the semi-supervised background. Second, the resampling technique is integrated into the self-training process to effectively reduce the influence of class imbalance on the identification effect.

Citation

Zeng, Z., Li, T., Sun, S., Sun, J. and Yin, J. (2022), "A novel semi-supervised self-training method based on resampling for Twitter fake account identification", Data Technologies and Applications, Vol. 56 No. 3, pp. 409-428. https://doi.org/10.1108/DTA-07-2021-0196