​​May-June 2021, Vol. 6, No. 5-6, pp. 89-94. 

​​Fake news detection using machine learning

S. P. Sivananthan, S. T. Saravanan*, M. Udhai Ram
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, R. M. K. College of Engineering and Technology, Chennai, India.

​​*Corresponding author’s e-mail:sara17cs080@rmkcet.ac.in

Abstract

The advent of the World Wide Web and the rapid adoption of social media platforms (such as Facebook and Twitter) paved the way for information dissemination that has never been witnessed in the human history before. With the current usage of social media platforms, consumers are creating and sharing more information than ever before, some of which are misleading with no relevance to reality. Automated classification of a text article as misinformation or disinformation is a challenging task. Even an expert in a particular domain must explore multiple aspects before giving a verdict on the truthfulness of an article. In this work, we propose to use machine learning ensemble approach for automated classification of news articles. Our study explores different textual properties that can be used to distinguish fake contents from real. By using those properties, we train a combination of different machine learning algorithms using various ensemble methods and evaluate their performance on 4 real world datasets. Experimental evaluation confirms the superior performance of our proposed ensemble learner approach in comparison to individual learners.

Keywords: Stochastic gradient descent; Term frequency-inverse document frequency; Linear support vector machine; Fake News.

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International Journal of Modern Science and Technology

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ISSN 2456-0235