Inclusive Study of Fake News Detection for COVID-19 with New Dataset using Supervised Learning Algorithms

Abstract

Covid-19 imposes many bans and restrictions on news, individuals and teams, and thus social networks have become one of the most used platforms for sharing and destroying news, which can be either fake or true. Therefore, detecting fake news has become imperative and thus has drawn the attention of researchers to develop approaches for understanding and classifying news content. The focus was on the Twitter platform because it is one of the most used platforms for sharing and disseminating information among many organizations, personalities, news agencies, and satellite stations. In this research, we attempt to improve the detection process of fake news by employing supervised machine learning techniques on our newly developed dataset. Specifically, the proposed system categorizes fake news related to COVID-19 extracted from the Twitter platform using four machine learning-based models, including decision tree (DT), Naïve Bayes (NB), artificial neural network (ANN), and k-nearest neighbors (KNN) classifiers. Besides, the developed detection models were evaluated on our new dataset, which we extracted from Twitter in a real-time process using standard evaluation metrics such as detection accuracy (ACC), F1-score (FSC), the under the curve (AUC), and Matthew's correlation coefficient (MCC). In the first set of experiments which employ the full dataset (i.e., 14,000 tweets), our experimental evaluation reported that DT based detection model had achieved the highest detection performance scoring 99.0%, 96.0%, 98.0%, and 90.0% in ACC, FSC, AUC, and MCC, respectively. The second set of experiments employs the small dataset (i.e., 700 tweets); our experimental evaluation reported that DT based detection model had achieved the highest detection performance scoring 89.5%, 89.5%, 93.0%, and 80.0% in ACC, FSC, AUC, and MCC, respectively. The results obtained for all experiments have been generated for the best-selected features.