Fake Profile Detection Using XGBoost Algorithm

R. Venkadesh, K. Rahuman Khan, G. Ramkishore, R. Rakesh and S. Suyambulingaraj

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Mahendra Engineering College, Tamil Nadu, India

Keywords: Fake Profile Detection, Profile Features, Normalization.

Abstract: With time many algorithm has been built for social media application, but with the changing environment

fake profile is still a problem. Here is a simple approach to building a fake profile detection system using

XGBoost. Start with a dataset containing user profile features such as account age, profile completeness (bio,

photo, etc.), activity patterns (post frequency, interactions), and engagement metrics (likes, comments, etc.).

Utilize pre-verification process or clustering methods to label profiles as “fake” or “genuine” which can

produce a trustworthy dataset. Impute missing values and encode categorical data (e.g., one-hot encoding of

profile types) into numerical form. This is a pretty basic standardization of input data. User behavior, like

average session duration and friend requests, can be leveraged to create better detection insights.

1 INTRODUCTION

Our model must make a decision as to whether the

profile in question is indeed a fake profile or not.

These fake profiles can do a lot of things like

spreading misinformation, committing fraud or

manipulating social influence. Being able to detect

these profiles effectively became paramount to the

platforms that wanted to have an authentic and

trustworthy userbase. We focus on the use of the

XGBoost algorithm one of the most-proposed

solutions for such problems which was a significant

and powerful machine learning method based on a

technique known as gradient boosting, used

successfully for structured data, such as for detecting

fake computer profiles. The ability of XGBoost to

handle large datasets and detect natural relationships

between features makes it a perfect choice for the

identification of fake profiles via behavioral and

profile data features. This could involve looking at

account activity stats such as how often someone logs

in, whether they receive lots of friend requests, how

much of their profile they fill out and any other

distinctive features that may help to identify whether

an account is legitimate or fake. Fake profile

detection based on XGBoost is across multiple steps,

which starts from data collecting to data

preprocessing. Profiles are analyzed for shared

characteristics or suspicious behavior typically linked

to bots. This stage focuses on transforming and

feature engineering the collected data to configure the

most relevant information that enables the model to

better identify fake accounts. These hyper parameters

of XGBoost are finally tuned to achieve an optimal

performance where the model generalizes well to

detect, without any false positives, fake profiles.

1.1 Utilizing Data Analytics and

Machine Learning

With data analytics and machine learning,

organizations analyze data to enhance decision

making, processes, and identification of trends in

huge amounts of data. Through the application of

data analytics, businesses can extract useful

information from raw data to inform business

strategy, recognize trends, and anticipate future

events. These insights enable data-driven decisions

that improve efficiency, cost savings, and customer

satisfaction. While data science allows for data to be

analyzed, machine learning (ML), a subset of

artificial intelligence (AI), takes things a step further

by using data to train systems to learn and do work

more effectively without having to be explicitly

programmed. Machine-learning models harness

historical data to recognize patterns, enabling them to

make predictions or classifications that help solve

complex problems in fields as diverse as healthcare,

finance, marketing and cybersecurity. Data analytics

and machine learning combined will help

organizations predict customer behavior, detect

anomalies, automate routine tasks, and even

Venkadesh, R., Khan, K. R., Ramkishore, G., Rakesh, R. and Suyambulingaraj, S.

Fake Proﬁle Detection Using XGBoost Algorithm.

DOI: 10.5220/0013941400004919

Paper published under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Research and Development in Information, Communication, and Computing Technologies (ICRDICCT‘25 2025) - Volume 5, pages

663-670

ISBN: 978-989-758-777-1

663

personalize user experiences. Retailers, for instance,

can use data analytics to understand purchase trends,

and machine-learning models can then predict

individual customer preferences to personalize

recommendations. In finance, these can include

detecting fraudulent transactions in real time through

identifying irregular patterns that indicate potential

fraud. Data Analytics & Machine Learning

Implementation typically begins with data collection

and preprocessing to ensure data quality. This process

is repeated until the model performance meets the

required threshold. Evaluation and fine-tuning of

these make sure that they give the desired results.

1.2 Machine Learning

It is in no small part thanks to recent changes in

machine learning algorithms, which have evolved

dramatically in their ability to learn from large

amounts of data with little need for human

involvement. This transition marks a significant

moment in the advancement of our technological

engagement. Related to this is automated analytics, in

which computational methods are used to extract

useful predictive insights from data. The integration of

machine learning and analytics goes a long way in

helping us understand data patterns better and guide

decision-making in diverse industries. Machine

learning is also based on concepts from classical

optimization, which is used to improve the

correctness and efficiency of models. Through careful

algorithmic optimization, systems are better capable

of managing and accommodating the complexity of

real-world data, leading to more robust and adaptable

solutions. Figure 1 shows the overview of machine

learning.

Figure 1: Overview of machine learning.

1.3 Problem Statement

A lot of issues occurred in social networks today like

spoofed accounts in modern contact. The government

hasn’t yet prepared a remedial measure to deal with

these problems.

In this paper we propose an approach for the

computer based early detection of fake profiles in

terms of the society of human beings. Moreover, the

automatic detection techniques we are using are

nearly impossible to achieve manually, which relieve

the pressure of the management of the websites on the

profile differentiation.

2 RELATED WORKS

Several machine learning algorithms such as support

vector machines (SVM), random forests, and neural

networks have been developed to detect fake profiles

on social media platforms. These approaches

typically analyze user behavior, account

characteristics, and network structures to identify

suspicious accounts (Zhang & Zheng, 2019; Sun &

Wang, 2020; Yao & Zhang, 2020). Research focused

on identifying Twitter bots and fraudulent LinkedIn

profiles offers valuable insights for this domain

(Zhang & Tang, 2018; Li & Zhao, 2017).

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In addition to machine learning, plagiarism

detection methods based on text similarity,

stylometry, and semantic analysis are relevant. These

techniques uncover patterns of content reuse and

manipulation, which may also be employed by fake

profiles attempting to bypass detection systems.

Techniques analyzing user activity patterns such as

input speed are particularly effective within

behavioral analysis frameworks for detecting

inauthentic users (Zhan & Yang, 2018; Hasan &

Zhang, 2021).

Natural language processing (NLP) approaches,

including Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) for topic

modeling and BERT embeddings for semantic

similarity, can extract linguistic and semantic features

from text data that correlate with fraudulent profile

behavior. These techniques, widely used in

plagiarism detection, provide a foundation for

identifying manipulation and deception in profile

content (Xu & Li, 2020; Ahmed & Hong, 2020).

Both static data (e.g., profile information) and

dynamic data (e.g., real-time user interactions) are

critical for online identity verification. Verification

methods such as facial recognition, CAPTCHA tests,

and email confirmation offer additional layers of

defense against fake profiles (Zhang & Tang, 2018;

He & Ma, 2018). Moreover, cross-platform identity

validation examining whether the same profile

appears across multiple platforms enhances detection

accuracy. Designing mechanisms to detect cross-

platform identity correlation, supported by relevant

literature, can strengthen the authenticity assessment

of online profiles (Chen & Zhang, 2020; Zhang &

Wang, 2021).

3 PROPOSED SYSTEM

Users of social media platforms, online marketplaces,

and dating apps face growing threats to their safety

and trust as the number of fake profiles continues to

rise. In light of this challenge, the proposed system

strives to create a strong fake profile detection

mechanism using machine-learning methods,

focusing on the XGBoost algorithm specifically. We

will implement XGBoost a gradient boosting

framework that is popular because it is very efficient

when it comes to large datasets and can model

complex relationships in your data XGBoost is

perfect for this task. The system will use algorithms

to audit user profiles and identify suspicious patterns

or inconsistencies that could suggest fake profiles.

Some features will be used for implementing the

proposed approach which includes profile features

(name, photo authenticity), social interactions,

behavioral patterns, and historical data. Figure 2

shows the architecture diagram for fake profile

detection.

Figure 2: Architecture Diagram for Fake Profile Detection.

Fake Proﬁle Detection Using XGBoost Algorithm

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4 METHODOLOGY

4.1 Data Collection

It allows you to spy on an existing platform for fake

profiles using a rich dataset of user profiles. Gather

Information such as the username, a little background

about their profile, registration date, and an email

address. But it will track the activity logs, eg login

frequency, post interactions, time spent on the

platform, etc. Social Media Platform: Number of

followers/following, user post frequency, and

engagement stats the data collection has two

primary sources. The first source is from Kaggle

(Shilpa, S and Raj, S. 2019), while the second is

sourced from Git.centre. Table 1 gives the Fake

Profile Attributes.

Table 1: Fake Profile Attributes.

Attributes Description

Profile Picture User has a profile picture or not

Full name

words

Number of words in tokens

Bio/Description

length

Description length in characters

External URL Has external URL or not

Private Private account or not

Posts Number of posts

Followers Number of followers

Follows Number of follows

4.2 Data Pre-Processing

Data processing of fake profile data set involves

cleaning, transforming and re-organizing raw data so

that it is ready for modeling. These tasks may include

dealing with missing data, removing duplicates, and

converting categorical variables to numerical formats

(e.g., encoding). So data like activity logs, post

frequency, textual data are extracted and NLP

techniques are used to extract features from user

profiles you then normalize or standardize the data.

4.3 Model Development with XGBoost

In this step, we build the model for the detection of

fake profiles for any free plagiarism detection

website using XGBoost; we collect the user and

plagiarism data, perform feature engineering (textual

and behavioural) and perform encoding for

categorical features. The XGBoost model is trained

on this data and evaluated using metrics such as

accuracy and F1-score and deployed over API for

real-time detection.

4.4 Fake Profile Detection

Fake profile detection in free plagiarism systems:

Fake profile detection in free plagiarism systems is an

organization that detects for fraud by inspecting use

set and content arrangement. XGBoost and similar

models are trained based on profiles, logins, and

activity data alongside plagiarism scores. These

models mark suspicious profiles aiding in

verification, and reducing potential misuse.

4.5 Deployment and Continuous

Learning

Use Flask or FastAPI to Deploy the Trained Fake

Profile Detection Model as a REST API This API will

do the real-time profile validation by extracting the

users’ profiles and flagged content. The API works

with the plagiarism detection platform to

automatically scan for and flag suspicious profiles for

additional review.

XGBoost Objective Function: The objective

function of XGBoost minimizes a regularized loss

function:

ℒ





∑

𝑙



𝑦



,𝑦





∑

Ω𝑓

𝑘











(1)

Where 𝑦



is the predicted probability of a fake

profile for xi. 𝑙



𝑦



,𝑦





is the log loss for binary

classification:

𝑙



𝑦



,𝑦





= −



𝑦



log



𝑦









1−𝑦





log



1−𝑦









(2)

Ω(f k) is the regularization term:



𝑓





= 𝛾𝑇+





∑

𝜔







(3)

5 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

XGBoost (Extreme Gradient Boosting) algorithm is a

machine learning algorithm that excels for

classifying purposes such as identifying fake profiles

on social media platforms or other online services.

We use a dataset similar to Kyumin et al. and

introduced features including profile picture

validation, user activity data, profile completeness,

and other behavioral features in our analysis, for

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which we employed XGBoost in our experiment. For

the dataset to be used to train our models, it went

through a preprocessing stage where we ensured that

all features fell into a suitable format.

Fake profiles are much rarer than real profiles,

resulting in a class imbalance in the training set. To

mitigate this problem, we used techniques such as

oversampling the minority class, and using class

weights when training our XGBoost model, which

helped improve model performance. Although

XGBoost handles various features quite well, the

numerical representation of features plays an

important role in the performance of the model.

Complete name. Imposter profiles might utilize

fictitious names that can be either surprisingly brief

or excessively lengthy in comparison to genuine

users.ratio_numlen_fullname: The proportion of

numerical (figure 3).

Figure 3: Input.

5.1 Dataset Visualization

The dataset you supplied seems organized with

multiple features for identifying fake profiles,

including profile details, user activities, and metadata.

Here is a short description of the features present in

your dataset, along with their possible functions in

identifying fraudulent profiles, deceptive: (Target

Label) This column shows if the profile is deceptive

(1) or genuine (0). It serves as the objective variable

for classification. profile_pic: Shows if the user

possesses a profile picture (Yes/No).

Figure 4: Correlation heat map.

An absent or standard profile picture could

indicate a fraudulent profile. ratio_numlen_

username: The proportion of numeric digits to the

overall length of the username. Imposter accounts

frequently feature generic or less personalized

usernames, which may display an abnormally high

Fake Proﬁle Detection Using XGBoost Algorithm

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count of digits. len_full name: The total number of

characters in the user's characters in the complete

name. Phony profiles may utilize alphanumeric

usernames or irregular naming conventions.

A correlation heatmap (figure 4) is a visual

depiction of the correlation matrix, with each cell

indicating the relationship between two variables.

The heatmap uses gradients of color to represent the

strength and direction of the correlation, making it

easier to identify patterns and relationships between

different variables. Correlation heatmap - This can

be a very useful technique to understand the

correlation between different features of user profiles

with the likelihood to be fake in the context of fake

profile detection. It has provided us with patterns

separating real versus fake accounts, given

correlation heatmap that shows the direction and

strength of the correlations between variables. Table

2 gives the algorithm comparison of different

machine learning. Figure 5 depicts the bar chart

comparison fake profile.

Table 2: Algorithm comparison of different machine learning.

Algorithm Accuracy Description

Logistic regression 70%-80%

A linear model that works well for simpler,

linearly separable data

Decision tree 75%-85%

Performs well with non-linear data but prone to

overfitting

Random forest 80%-90%

An ensemble method that handles complex data

and reduces overfitting compared to Decision

Trees

Support vector machine 85%-95%

gradient boosting method that is known for high

accuracy, particularly on imbalanced datasets

XGBoost 90% - 95%

Figure 5: Bar chart comparison fake profile.

This bar chart illustrates the comparison of accuracy

across various machine learning algorithms for

detecting fake profiles. It presents both the minimum

and maximum accuracy values for each algorithm.

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• XGBoost and SVM deliver the highest

accuracy ranges.

• Random Forest and Decision Tree also offer

solid performance, providing a balanced

accuracy.

• Logistic Regression and KNN exhibit

slightly lower accuracy levels.

6 CONCLUSIONS

With the increasing reliance on the digital world, the

rise of fake profiles poses a serious threat to the trust

of users and the integrity of platforms. A robust

detection mechanism based on the XGBoost

algorithm is proposed by utilizing behavioral,

structural, and content-based features obtained from

user profiles in this study. The framework showed

promise for real-time and scalable fake profile

detection by preprocessing the data using a step-wise

approach, using engineered features, and deploying

the model using API. After analysis of the

experimental results we conclude that XGBoost

performs better both in accuracy and immune to class

imbalance than any of the traditional machine

learning models. The effectiveness of the system was

further validated using visualization techniques

including correlation heatmaps and comparative

performance analyses. This research emphasizes the

need to integrate machine learning with the dynamic

user domain in order to build socially robust

platforms that can react against manipulative digital

deception tactics. Future research might consider

hybrid ensemble strategies and cross-platform

validation to improve the potential deploy ability of

the model and its detection performance.

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