BotArtist: Generic approach for bot detection in Twitter via semi-automatic machine learning pipeline

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Shevtsov, Alexander, Antonakaki, Despoina, Lamprou, Ioannis, Pratikakis, Polyvios, Ioannidis, Sotiris
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912322710142976
author Shevtsov, Alexander
Antonakaki, Despoina
Lamprou, Ioannis
Pratikakis, Polyvios
Ioannidis, Sotiris
author_facet Shevtsov, Alexander
Antonakaki, Despoina
Lamprou, Ioannis
Pratikakis, Polyvios
Ioannidis, Sotiris
contents Twitter, as one of the most popular social networks, provides a platform for communication and online discourse. Unfortunately, it has also become a target for bots and fake accounts, resulting in the spread of false information and manipulation. This paper introduces a semi-automatic machine learning pipeline (SAMLP) designed to address the challenges associated with machine learning model development. Through this pipeline, we develop a comprehensive bot detection model named BotArtist, based on user profile features. SAMLP leverages nine distinct publicly available datasets to train the BotArtist model. To assess BotArtist's performance against current state-of-the-art solutions, we evaluate 35 existing Twitter bot detection methods, each utilizing a diverse range of features. Our comparative evaluation of BotArtist and these existing methods, conducted across nine public datasets under standardized conditions, reveals that the proposed model outperforms existing solutions by almost 10% in terms of F1-score, achieving an average score of 83.19% and 68.5% over specific and general approaches, respectively. As a result of this research, we provide one of the largest labeled Twitter bot datasets. The dataset contains extracted features combined with BotArtist predictions for 10,929,533 Twitter user profiles, collected via Twitter API during the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian War over a 16-month period. This dataset was created based on [Shevtsov et al., 2022a] where the original authors share anonymized tweets discussing the Russo-Ukrainian war, totaling 127,275,386 tweets. The combination of the existing textual dataset and the provided labeled bot and human profiles will enable future development of more advanced bot detection large language models in the post-Twitter API era.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2306_00037
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle BotArtist: Generic approach for bot detection in Twitter via semi-automatic machine learning pipeline
Shevtsov, Alexander
Antonakaki, Despoina
Lamprou, Ioannis
Pratikakis, Polyvios
Ioannidis, Sotiris
Social and Information Networks
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Twitter, as one of the most popular social networks, provides a platform for communication and online discourse. Unfortunately, it has also become a target for bots and fake accounts, resulting in the spread of false information and manipulation. This paper introduces a semi-automatic machine learning pipeline (SAMLP) designed to address the challenges associated with machine learning model development. Through this pipeline, we develop a comprehensive bot detection model named BotArtist, based on user profile features. SAMLP leverages nine distinct publicly available datasets to train the BotArtist model. To assess BotArtist's performance against current state-of-the-art solutions, we evaluate 35 existing Twitter bot detection methods, each utilizing a diverse range of features. Our comparative evaluation of BotArtist and these existing methods, conducted across nine public datasets under standardized conditions, reveals that the proposed model outperforms existing solutions by almost 10% in terms of F1-score, achieving an average score of 83.19% and 68.5% over specific and general approaches, respectively. As a result of this research, we provide one of the largest labeled Twitter bot datasets. The dataset contains extracted features combined with BotArtist predictions for 10,929,533 Twitter user profiles, collected via Twitter API during the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian War over a 16-month period. This dataset was created based on [Shevtsov et al., 2022a] where the original authors share anonymized tweets discussing the Russo-Ukrainian war, totaling 127,275,386 tweets. The combination of the existing textual dataset and the provided labeled bot and human profiles will enable future development of more advanced bot detection large language models in the post-Twitter API era.
title BotArtist: Generic approach for bot detection in Twitter via semi-automatic machine learning pipeline
topic Social and Information Networks
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.00037