METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR PREDICTING VICTIM USERS AND DETECTING FAKE USER ACCOUNTS IN ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORKS

A system and method for predicting victims and detecting fake accounts in OSNs, comprising: a feature-based classifier for predicting victims by classifying, with a classification probability, a target variable of each user in the OSN social graph; a graph-transformer for transforming the social graph into a defense graph by reassigning edge weights to incorporate victim predictions using the classification probability, a graph-based detector for detecting fake users by computing through the power iteration method a probability of a random walk to land on each node in the defense graph after 0(log n) steps, assigning to each node a rank value equal to a node's landing probability normalized by the node degree, sorting the nodes by their rank value and estimating a detection threshold such that each node whose rank value is smaller than the detection threshold is flagged as representing a fake account.