A Novel Stacking Approach for Accurate Detection of Fake News

With the increasing popularity of social media, people has changed the way they access news. News online has become the major source of information for people. However, much information appearing on the Internet is dubious and even intended to mislead. Some fake news are so similar to the real ones that it is difficult for human to identify them. Therefore, automated fake news detection tools like machine learning and deep learning models have become an essential requirement. In this paper, we evaluated the performance of five machine learning models and three deep learning models on two fake and real news datasets of different size with hold out cross validation. We also used term frequency, term frequency-inverse document frequency and embedding techniques to obtain text representation for machine learning and deep learning models respectively. To evaluate models' performance, we used accuracy, precision, recall and F1-score as the evaluation metrics and a corrected version of McNemar's test to determine if models' performance is significantly different. Then, we proposed our novel stacking model which achieved testing accuracy of 99.94% and 96.05 % respectively on the ISOT dataset and KDnugget dataset. Furthermore, the performance of our proposed method is high as compared to baseline methods. Thus, we highly recommend it for fake news detection.

Automated summary

With the rise of social media, accessing news online has become the main source of information for people. This study evaluated the performance of fake news detection tools and proposed a novel stacking model that outperformed baseline methods.