Particle Swarm Optimization on Deep Reinforcement Learning for Detecting Social Spam Bots and Spam-Influential Users in Twitter Network

In online social networks (OSNs), detection of malicious social bots is an important research challenge to provide legitimacy of user profiles and trustworthy service ratings. Further, spam-influential users must be minimal to control the fake information-spread in OSNs. Learning from example patterns using supervised learning may not provide accurate results in cases where existing data items are biased and bot behavior dynamically changes over a period of time. Moreover, deep reinforcement learning provides improved learning by repeated interactions with the environment. However, a typical deep reinforcement leaning algorithm converges slower to find an optimal sequence of actions to reach out a goal state. In this article, we design a particle swarm optimization (PSO) based deep Q-learning algorithm for detecting social spam bots by integrating PSO with Q-value function. In addition, spam-influential users are identified using the proposed spam influence minimization model and it helps in restricting the flow of illegitimate tweets in Twitter network. Further, an influential community detection algorithm has been proposed to reduce the spreading of spam content through influential communities in Twitter network. Experimental results illustrate the efficacy of our proposed algorithms by considering two Twitter datasets and performance metrics such as precision, recall, and modularity.