An Improved Classification Model for Fake News Detection in Social Media

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Author(s)

Bodunde Akinyemi 1,* Oluwakemi Adewusi 1 Adedoyin Oyebade 1

1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria

* Corresponding author.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5815/ijitcs.2020.01.05

Received: 30 Nov. 2019 / Revised: 19 Dec. 2019 / Accepted: 25 Dec. 2019 / Published: 8 Feb. 2020

Index Terms

Fake news, classification, stacking ensemble, news instances, news content, social-context features, social media

Abstract

Fake news dissemination is a critical issue in today’s fast-changing network environment. Existing classification models for fake news detection have not completely stopped the spread because of their inability to accurately classify news, thus leading to a high false alarm rate. This study proposed a model that can accurately identify and classify deceptive news articles content infused on social media by malicious users. The news content, social-context features and the respective classification of reported news was extracted from the PHEME dataset using entropy-based feature selection. The selected features were normalized using Min-Max Normalization techniques. A predictive fake news detection model was formulated as a stacked ensemble of three algorithms. The model was simulated and its performance was evaluated by benchmarking with an existing model using detection accuracy, sensitivity, and precision as metrics. The result of the evaluation showed a higher 17.25% detection accuracy, 15.78% sensitivity, but lesser 0.2% precision than the existing model. Thus, the proposed model detects more fake news instances accurately based on news content and social content perspectives. This indicates that the proposed classification model has a better detection rate, reduces the false alarm rate of news instances and thus detects fake news more accurately.

Cite This Paper

Bodunde Akinyemi, Oluwakemi Adewusi, Adedoyin Oyebade, "An Improved Classification Model for Fake News Detection in Social Media", International Journal of Information Technology and Computer Science(IJITCS), Vol.12, No.1, pp.34-43, 2020. DOI:10.5815/ijitcs.2020.01.05

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