Multiclass Fake News Detection using Ensemble Machine Learning

Abstract

Over the past few years, fake news and its influence have become a growing cause of concern in terms of debate and public discussions. Due to the availability of the Internet, a lot of user-generated content is produced across the globe in a single day using various social media platforms. Nowadays, it has become very easy to create fake news and propagate it worldwide within a short period of time. Despite receiving significant attention in the research community, fake news detection did not improve significantly due to insufficient context-specific news data. Most of the researchers have analyzed the fake news problem as a binary classification problem, but many more prediction classes exist. In this research work, experiments have been conducted using a tree-based Ensemble Machine Learning framework (Gradient Boosting) with optimized parameters combining content and context level features for fake news detection. Recently, adaptive boosting methods for classification problems have been derived as gradient descent algorithms. This formulation justifies key elements and parameters in the methods, which are chosen to optimize a single common objective function. Experiments are conducted using a multi-class dataset (FNC) and various machine learning models are used for classification. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the ensemble framework compared to existing benchmark results. Using the Gradient Boosting algorithm (an ensemble machine learning framework), we achieved an accuracy of 86% for multi-class classification of fake news having four classes.