Spam Detection in Twitter by Ensemble Learning Approach

Today, social networks play a crucial role in disseminating information worldwide. Twitter is one of the most popular social networks, with 500 million tweets sent on a daily basis. The popularity of this network among users has led spammers to exploit it for distributing spam posts. This paper employs a combination of machine learning methods to identify spam at the tweet level. The proposed method utilizes a feature extraction framework in two stages. In the first stage, Stacked Autoencoder is used for feature extraction, and in the second stage, the extracted features from the last layer of Stacked Autoencoder are fed into the softmax layer for prediction. The proposed method is compared and evaluated against some popular methods on the Twitter Spam Detection corpus using accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score metrics. The research results indicate that the proposed method achieves a detection of 78.1%. Overall, the proposed method, using the majority voting approach with a hard selection in ensemble learning, outperforms CNN, LSTM, and SCCL methods in identifying spam tweets with higher accuracy.