Paper Title
Discovery of Ranking Fraud for Mobile Apps
Abstract
The Mobile App is a very popular and well known concept due to the rapid advancement in the mobile
technology. Due to the large number of mobile Apps, ranking fraud is the key challenge in front of the mobile App market.
Ranking fraud refers to fraudulent or vulnerable activities which have a purpose of bumping up the Apps in the popularity
list. While the importance and necessity of preventing ranking fraud has been widely recognized. In the existing system the
leading event and leading session of an app is identified from the collected historical records. Then three different types of
evidences are collected from the user feedbacks namely ranking based evidence, rating based evidence and review based
evidence. These three evidences are aggregated by using evidence aggregation method. In the proposed system additionally,
we are proposing two enhancements. Firstly, we are using Approval of scores by the admin to identify the exact reviews and
rating scores. Secondly, the fake feedbacks by a same person for pushing up that app on the leader board are restricted. Two
different constraints are considered for accepting the feedback given to an application. The first constraint is that an app can
be rated only once from a user login and the second is implemented with the aid of IP address that limits the number of user
login logged per day. Finally, the proposed system will be evaluated with real-world App data which is to be collected from
the App Store for a long time period.
In Rating Based Evidences, specifically, after an App has been published, it can be rated by any user who downloaded it.
Indeed, user rating is one of the most important features of App advertisement. An App which has higher rating may attract
more users to download and can also be ranked higher in the leader board. Thus, rating manipulation is also an important
perspective of ranking fraud. In Review Based Evidences, besides ratings, most of the App stores also allow users to write
some textual comments as App reviews. Especially, this paper proposes a simple and effective algorithm to recognize the
leading sessions of each mobile App based on its historical ranking records. This is one of the fraud evidence. Also, rating
and review history, which gives some anomaly patterns from apps historical rating and reviews records.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section II, presents the literature survey over the related work. In section III,
proposed system is presented in section IV, implementation for each modules. Finally, the section V concludes the review
paper.
Keywords - Mobile Apps, ranking fraud detection, evidence aggregation, historical ranking records, rating and review.