Web credibility: Features exploration and credibility prediction

Abstract

The open nature of the World Wide Web makes evaluating webpage credibility challenging for users. In this paper, we aim to automatically assess web credibility by investigating various characteristics of webpages. Specifically, we first identify features from textual content, link structure, webpages design, as well as their social popularity learned from popular social media sites (e.g., Facebook, Twitter). A set of statistical analyses methods are applied to select the most informative features, which are then used to infer webpages credibility by employing supervised learning algorithms. Real dataset-based experiments under two application settings show that we attain an accuracy of 75% for classification, and an improvement of 53% for the mean absolute error (MAE), with respect to the random baseline approach, for regression. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.