Twitter Bot Identification: An Anomaly Detection Approach

Lulwah AlKulaib, Lei Zhang, Yanshen Sun

Abstract

The vast presence of bots on Twitter requires reliable and accurate bot detection methods that differentiate legitimate bots from malicious ones. Despite the success of those methods, they fail to address the following challenges: (1) the huge size of datasets required to train a model to detect bots, (2) the constant evolution in bot accounts to evade automatic detection leads to scarcity in ground truth real-world datasets, and (3) the complexity in learning representations of a heterogeneous attributed network like Twitter. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, ADNET, to detect anomalies in Twitter-attributed networks using the least amount of labeled data. Specifically, we address the limitations of previous methods by proposing a topology-based active learning framework that uses a deep autoencoder to train the model and is able to handle large graphs better than previous methods. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in detecting anomalous bot accounts and reduces the annotation cost in Twitter attributed networks.

Lulwah Alkulaib, Lei Zhang, Yanshen Sun, Chang-Tien Lu: Twitter Bot Identification: An Anomaly Detection Approach. IEEE Big Data 2022: 3577-3585