Large-Scale Vandalism Detection with Linear Classifiers - The Conkerberry Vandalism Detector at WSDM Cup 2017

Abstract: Nowadays many artificial intelligence systems rely on knowledge bases for enriching the information they process. Such Knowledge Bases are usually difficult to obtain and therefore they are crowdsourced: they are available for everyone on the internet to suggest edits and add new information. Unfortunately, they are sometimes targeted by vandals who put inaccurate or offensive information there. This is especially bad for the systems that use these Knowledge Bases: for them it is important to use reliable information to make correct inferences. One of such knowledge bases is Wikidata, and to fight vandals the organizers of WSDM Cup 2017 challenged participants to build a model for detecting mistrustful edits. In this paper we present the second place solution to the cup: we show that it is possible to achieve competitive performance with simple linear classification. With our approach we can achieve AU ROC of 0.938 on the test data. Additionally, compared to other approaches, ours is significantly faster. The solution is made available on GitHub.