Automated Fake News Detection by LSTM Enabled with Optimal Feature Selection

Fake news plays a major role by broadcasting misinformation, which influences people’s knowledge or perceptions and distorts their decision-making and awareness. Online forums and social media have stimulated the broadcast of fake news by embedding it with truthful information. Thus, fake news has evolved into the main challenge of better impact in the information-driven community for intense fakesters. The detection of fake news articles that is generally found by considering the quality of the information in their news feeds under uncertain authenticity calls for automated tools. However, designing such tools is a major problem because of the multiple faces of fakesters. This paper offers a new text-analytics-driven method for detecting fake news to reduce the risks impacted by the consumption of fake news. The methodology for improved fake news detection focusses on four phases: (a) pre-processing, (b) feature extraction, (c) optimal feature selection and (d) classification. The pre-processing of the text data will be initially done by stop word removal, blank space removal and stemming. Further, the feature extraction is performed by term frequency-inverse document frequency, and grammatical analysis is done using mean, Q25, Q50, Q75, Max, Min and standard deviation. Then, the optimal feature selection is developed, which minimises the number of input variables. It is intended to reduce the number of input variables to improve the model’s performance by minimising the computational cost of modelling. An improved meta-heuristic algorithm called successive position-based barnacles mating optimisation is used for optimal feature selection and classification. As the main contribution, the influence of deep learning is employed, which employs optimised long short-term memory. Finally, the result shows the superiority in terms of different significant measures by the proposed model over other methods for fake news detection experimentally done on a publicly available benchmark dataset.