Dr. Naveen Kumar Published in Journal of Management Information Systems

For release:  April 17, 2018

Dr. Naveen Kumar, assistant professor in the department of Business Information and Technology, recently published his paper entitled, "Detecting Review Manipulation on Online Platforms with Hierarchical Supervised Learning" in the prestigious Journal of Management Information Systems. Coauthors include Deepak Venugopal of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Memphis, Liangfei Qiu of the University of Florida, and Subodha Kumar of Temple University.

This paper offers solutions for detecting false or deceptive online reviews posted by opinion spammers. These dishonest posts negatively impact both consumers and businesses but can be difficult to identify because of complex interactions between several user characteristics, such as review velocity, volume, and variety. The authors propose a novel hierarchical supervised-learning approach to increase the likelihood of detecting anomalies by analyzing several user features and then characterizing their collective behavior in a unified manner. Specifically, they model user characteristics and interactions among them as univariate and multivariate distributions and then stack these distributions using several supervised-learning techniques, such as logistic regression, support vector machine, and k-nearest neighbors, thus yielding robust meta-classifiers. This approach can help reduce false reviews and increase consumer confidence in the credibility of businesses' online information.

Dr. Bill Kettinger, FedEx Chair of Excellence in MIS in the department of Business Information and Technology praised Dr. Kumar's accomplishment, saying, "Naveen was the first of three business analytics faculty hires made in BIT to help establish the department as a leader in teaching and research in analytics. Naveen is clearly on the right path to bring us this recognition with his publication in Journal of Management Information Systems. JMIS is an elite journal ranked in the highly regarded Financial Times-50 – list of the best business journals in the world.".