Markov enhanced graph attention network for spammer detection in online social network

Online social networks (OSNs) are an indispensable part of social communication where people connect and share information. Spammers and other malicious actors use the OSN’s power to propagate spam content. In an OSN with mutual relations between nodes, two kinds of spammer detection methods can be employed: feature based and propagation based. However, both of these are incomplete in themselves. The feature-based methods cannot exploit mutual connections between nodes, and propagation-based methods cannot utilize the rich discriminating node features. We propose a hybrid model—Markov enhanced graph attention network (MEGAT)—using graph attention networks (GAT) and pairwise Markov random fields (pMRF) for the spammer detection task. It efficiently utilizes node features as well as propagation information. We experiment our GAT model with a smoother Swish activation function having non-monotonic derivatives, instead of the leakyReLU function. The experiments performed on a real-world Twitter Social Honeypot (TwitterSH) benchmark dataset and subsequent comparative analysis reveal that our proposed MEGAT model outperforms the state-of-the-art models in accuracy, precision–recall area under curve (PRAUC), and F1-score performance measures.