Machine learning for fake news classification with optimal feature selection

Abstract

Nowadays, current events related to diverse fields are published in newspapers, shared on social media and broadcasted on radio and television. The explosive growth in online news contents has made it very difficult to discriminate between real and fake. As a result, fake news has become prevalent and immensely challenging to analyze and verify. Indeed, it is a big challenge to the government and public to debate the situation depending on case to case. For this purpose, a mechanism has to be taken on fact-checking rumors and statements particularly those that get thousands of views and likes before being debunked and refuted by expert sources. Various machine learning techniques have been used to detect and classify fake news. However, these approaches are restricted in terms of accuracy. This study has applied a random forest (RF) classifier to predict fake or real news. For this purpose, twenty-three (23) textual features are extracted from ISOT Fake News Dataset. Four best feature selection techniques like chi2, univariate, information gain and feature importance are used to select fourteen best features out of twenty-three. The proposed model and other benchmark techniques are evaluated on benchmark dataset using best features. Experimental findings show that the proposed model outperformed state-of-the-art machine learning techniques such as GBM, XGBoost and Ada Boost Regression Model in terms of classification accuracy.