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Researchers across many disciplines seek to understand how misinformation spreads with a view toward limiting its impact. One important question in this research is how people determine whether a given piece of news is real or fake. In the current article, we discuss the value of signal detection theory (SDT) in disentangling two distinct aspects in the identification of fake news: (a) ability to accurately distinguish between real news and fake news and (b) response biases to judge news as real or fake regardless of news veracity. The value of SDT for understanding the determinants of fake-news beliefs is illustrated with reanalyses of existing data sets, providing more nuanced insights into how partisan bias, cognitive reflection, and prior exposure influence the identification of fake news. Implications of SDT for the use of source-related information in the identification of fake news, interventions to improve people’s skills in detecting fake news, and the debunking of misinformation are discussed.
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Fake News Detection Enhancement with Data Imputation
Raw datasets collected for fake news detection usually contain some noise such as missing values. In order to improve the performance of machine learning based fake news detection, a novel data preprocessing method is proposed in this paper to process the missing values. Specifically, we have successfully handled the missing values problem by using data imputation for both categorical and numerical features. For categorical features, we imputed missing values with the most frequent value in the columns. For numerical features, the mean value of the column is used to impute numerical missing values. In addition, TF-IDF vectorization is applied in feature extraction to filter out irrelevant features. Experimental results show that Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) classifier with the proposed data preprocessing method outperforms baselines and improves the prediction accuracy by more than 15%.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1712496
- PAR ID:
- 10438715
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2018 IEEE 16th Intl Conf on Dependable, Autonomic and Secure Computing, 16th Intl Conf on Pervasive Intelligence and Computing, 4th Intl Conf on Big Data Intelligence and Computing and Cyber Science and Technology Congress(DASC/PiCom/DataCom/CyberSciTech)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 187 to 192
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/DASC/PiCom/DataCom/CyberSciTec.2018.00042
