Detection of Human, Legitimate Bot, and Malicious Bot in Online Social Networks Based on Wavelets

Abstract

Social interactions take place in environments that influence people’s behaviours and perceptions. Nowadays, the users of Online Social Network (OSN) generate a massive amount of content based on social interactions. However, OSNs wide popularity and ease of access created a perfect scenario to practice malicious activities, compromising their reliability. To detect automatic information broadcast in OSN, we developed a wavelet-based model that classifies users as being human, legitimate robot, or malicious robot, as a result of spectral patterns obtained from users’ textual content. We create the feature vector from the Discrete Wavelet Transform along with a weighting scheme called Lexicon-based Coefficient Attenuation. In particular, we induce a classification model using the Random Forest algorithm over two real Twitter datasets. The corresponding results show the developed model achieved an average accuracy of 94.47% considering two different scenarios: single theme and miscellaneous one.