  Product reviews and ratings on e-commerce websites provide customers with
detailed insights about various aspects of the product such as quality,
usefulness, etc. Since they influence customers' buying decisions, product
reviews have become a fertile ground for abuse by sellers (colluding with
reviewers) to promote their own products or to tarnish the reputation of
competitor's products. In this paper, our focus is on detecting such abusive
entities (both sellers and reviewers) by applying tensor decomposition on the
product reviews data. While tensor decomposition is mostly unsupervised, we
formulate our problem as a semi-supervised binary multi-target tensor
decomposition, to take advantage of currently known abusive entities. We
empirically show that our multi-target semi-supervised model achieves higher
precision and recall in detecting abusive entities as compared to unsupervised
techniques. Finally, we show that our proposed stochastic partial natural
gradient inference for our model empirically achieves faster convergence than
stochastic gradient and Online-EM with sufficient statistics.
