Unmasking Deception: A Comparative Study of Tree-Based and Transformer-Based Models for Fake Review Detection on Yelp

The increasing prevalence of fake online reviews jeopardizes firms' profits, consumers' well-being, and the trustworthiness of e-commerce ecosystems. We face the significant challenge of accurately detecting fake reviews. In this paper, we undertake a comprehensive investigation of traditional and state-of-the-art machine learning models in classification, based on textual features, to detect fake online reviews. We attempt to examine existing and noteworthy models for fake online review detection, in terms of the effectiveness of textual features, the efficiency of sampling methods, and their performance of detection. Adopting a quantitative and data-driven approach, we scrutinize both tree-based and transformer-based detection models. Our comparative studies evidence that transformer-based models (specifically BERT and GPT-3) outperform tree-based models (i.e., Random Forest and XGBoost), in terms of accuracy, precision, and recall metrics. We use real data from online reviews on Yelp.com for implementation. The results demonstrate that our proposed approach can identify fraudulent reviews effectively and efficiently. Synthesizing ChatGPT-3, tree-based, and transformer-based models for fake online review detection is rather new but promising, this paper highlights their potential for better detection of fake online reviews.