Thanks to John Battelle's Searchblog (which in turn thanks Ross Stapleton-Gray) for highlighting this, an academic grant from the National Science Foundation aimed at improving the ways click fraud is dealt with.

Detecting click fraud collaboratively and in real time should be quite a feat.  I suppose it would mean much less relative arbitrary auditing, and probably much more transparency about why any given click would be approved or not.

 If it succeeds, it should make quite a difference.

Govt Study Funds Click Fraud Detection

Just in case the Googles of the world ain't paying attention:

This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project will provide a commercial solution to click fraud identification and prevention. The current existing solutions can not detect the so-called software click. This STTR project proposes a real time collaborative click fraud detection and prevention system to detect these software clicks. The approach draws on data mining techniques for fraud identification using detailed user activities. An accurate and efficient classification method based on association rule mining and data stream mining will be formulated to identify the click frauds.

The system will protect Pay-Per-Click advertisers from click fraud and improve their return on investment. The new data mining techniques discovered during the course of this research will be applied in multiple fields related to online business marketing, user analysis and other fraud identification processes.

Tags: click fraud, online advertising, Q-Ads, Federated Media, National Science Foundation, John Battelle, Ross Stapleton-Gray

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