A Quantum Beta Distributed Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm for Twitter Fake Accounts Detection

Abstract Fake account detection is a topical issue when many Online Social Networks encounter several issues caused by the growing number of unethical online activities. This study presents a new Quantum Beta-behaved Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimization (QB-MOPSO) algorithm for machine learning based Twitter fake accounts detection. The proposed approach aims to improve the learning process of deep neural networks, random forest, through minimizing simultaneously the feature dimensionality and the classification error rate. The main contribution consists in proposing a quantum beta MOPSO to handle the training phase of neural and deep architectures. The QB-MOPSO is used to perform a multi-objective training of the random forest algorithm. The QB-MOPSO has two optimization profiles: the first one uses a quantum-behaved equation for improving the exploratory behaviour of PSO, while the second one uses a beta function to enhance PSO’s exploitation. An extensive experimental study is carried out using two open Twitter datasets with 1982 and 928 accounts. The new proposal is a random forest QB-MOPSO. Results showed that random forest QB-MOPSO accuracy is about 99.19% and 97.52% accounts on datasets 1 and 2. Comparative analysis of the prosed architecture toward the original architecture showed that the use of QB-MOPSO for learning enhances the random forest algorithm which perform then the original ones.