Model-agnostic unsupervised detection of bots in a Likert-type questionnaire
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To detect bots in online survey data, there is a wealth of literature on statistical detection using only responses to Likert-type items. There are two traditions in the literature. One tradition requires labeled data, forgoing strong model assumptions. The other tradition requires a measurement model, forgoing collection of labeled data. In the present article, we consider the problem where neither requirement is available, for an inventory that has the same number of Likert-type categories for all items. We propose a bot detection algorithm that is both model-agnostic and unsupervised. Our proposed algorithm involves a permutation test with leave-one-out calculations of outlier statistics. For each respondent, it outputs a p-value for the null hypothesis that the respondent is a bot. Such an algorithm offers nominal sensitivity calibration that is robust to the bot response distribution. In a simulation study, we found our proposed algorithm to improve upon naive alternatives in terms of 95% sensitivity calibration and, in many scenarios, in terms of classification accuracy.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it