Unsupervised Social Bot Detection via Structural Information Theory

Research on social bot detection plays a crucial role in maintaining the order and reliability of information dissemination while increasing trust in social interactions. The current mainstream social bot detection models rely on black-box neural network technology, for example, Graph Neural Network, Transformer, and so on, which lacks interpretability. In this work, we present UnDBot, a novel unsupervised, interpretable, yet effective, and practical framework for detecting social bots. This framework is built upon structural information theory. We begin by designing three social relationship metrics that capture various aspects of social bot behaviors: posting type distribution, posting influence, and follow-to-follower ratio. Three new relationships are utilized to construct a new, unified, and weighted social multi-relational graph, aiming to model the relevance of social user behaviors and discover long-distance correlations between users. Second, we introduce a novel method for optimizing heterogeneous structural entropy. This method involves the personalized aggregation of edge information from the social multi-relational graph to generate a two-dimensional encoding tree. The heterogeneous structural entropy facilitates decoding of the substantial structure of the social bots network and enables hierarchical clustering of social bots. Third, a new community labeling method is presented to distinguish social bot communities by computing the user's stationary distribution, measuring user contributions to network structure, and counting the intensity of user aggregation within the community. Compared with 10 representative social bot detection approaches, comprehensive experiments demonstrate the advantages of effectiveness and interpretability of UnDBot on 4 real social network datasets.