IRJET- Fake News Detection using Logistic Regression

International Research Journal of Engineering and Technology (IRJET) e-ISSN: 2395-0056
Volume: 06 Issue: 05 | May 2019 www.irjet.net p-ISSN: 2395-0072
© 2019, IRJET | Impact Factor value: 7.211 | ISO 9001:2008 Certified Journal | Page 5577
FAKE NEWS DETECTION USING LOGISTIC REGRESSION
Fathima Nada1, Bariya Firdous Khan2, Aroofa Maryam3, Nooruz-Zuha4, Zameer Ahmed
1,2,3,4Anjuman Institute of Technology and Management , Bhatkal
5Under the guidance of (Professor of Computer Science and Engineering department AITM, Bhatkal)
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Abstract - Proliferation of misleading information in
everyday access media outlets such as social media feeds,
news blogs, and online newspapers have made it
challenging to identify trustworthy news sources, thus
increasing the need for computational tools able to provide
insights into the reliability of online content. In this paper,
we focus on the automatic identification of fake content in
the news articles. First, we introduce a dataset for the task
of fake news detection. We describe the pre-processing,
feature extraction, classification and prediction process in
detail. We’ve used Logistic Regression language processing
techniques to classify fake news. The pre-processing
functions perform some operations like tokenizing,
stemming and exploratory data analysis like response
variable distribution and data quality check (i.e. null or
missing values). Simple bag-of-words, n-grams, TF-IDF is
used as feature extraction techniques. Logistic regression
model is used as classifier for fake news detection with
probability of truth.
Key words: Fake news detection, Logistic regression,
TF-IDF vectorization.
1. INTRODUCTION
Fake news detection has recently attracted a
growing interest from the general public and researchers
as the circulation of misinformation online increases,
particularly in media outlets such as social media feeds,
news blogs, and online newspapers. A recent report by the
Jumpshot Tech Blog showed that Facebook referrals
accounted for 50% of the total traffic to fake news sites
and 20% total traffic to reputable websites. Since as many
as 62% of U.S. adults consume news on social media
(Jeffrey and Elisa, 2016), being able to identify fake
content in online sources is a pressing need.
Social media and the internet are suffering from
fake accounts, fake posts and fake news. The intention is
often to mislead readers and or manipulate them in
purchasing or believing something that isn’t real. So a
system like this would be a contribution in solving a
problem to some extent.
As human beings, when we read a sentence or a
paragraph, we can interpret the words with the whole
document and understand the context. In this project, we
teach a system how to read and understand the
differences between real news and the fake news using
concepts like natural language processing, NLP and
machine learning and prediction classifiers like the
Logistic regression which will predict the truthfulness or
fakeness of an article.
2. LITERATURE REVIEWS
In general, Fake news could be categorized into
three groups. The first group is fake news, which is news
that is completely fake and is made up by the writers of
the articles. The second group is fake satire news, which is
fake news whose main purpose is to provide humour to
the readers. The third group is poorly written news
articles, which have some degree of real news, but they are
not entirely accurate. In short, it is news that uses, for
example, quotes from political figures to report a fully fake
story. Usually, this kind of news is designed to promote
certain agenda or biased opinion [1].
In the article published by Kai Shu, Amy Sliva,
Suhang Wang, Jiliang Tang, and Huan Liu [2], they
explored the fake news problem by reviewing existing
literature in two phases: characterization and detection. In
the characterization phase, they introduced the basic
concepts and principles of fake news in both traditional
media and social media. In the detection phase, they
reviewed existing fake news detection approaches from a
data mining perspective, including feature extraction and
model construction.
Hadeer Ahmed, Issa Traore, and Sherif Saad [3]
proposed in their paper, a fake news detection model that
uses n-gram analysis and machine learning techniques.
They investigated and compared two different features
extraction techniques and six different machine
classification techniques. Experimental evaluation yields
the best performance using Term Frequency-Inverted
Document Frequency (TF-IDF) as feature extraction
technique, and Linear Support Vector Machine (LSVM) as a
classifier, with an accuracy of 92%.
Perez-Rosas, Veronica & Kleinberg, Bennett and
Lefevre Alexandra and Rada Mihalcea [4] in their
publication “Automatic detection of fake news” focus on
the automatic identification of fake contents in online
news. For this they introduced two different datasets, one
obtained through crowd sourcing and covering six news
domains (sports, business, entertainment, politics,
technology and education) and another one obtained from

the web covering celebrities. They developed some
classification models using linear sum classifier and five-
fold cross verification with accuracy, precision and recall
and FI measures averaged over the five iterations that rely
on the combination of lexical, syntactic and semantic
information as well as features representing text
readability properties which are comparable to human
ability to spot fakes.
E.M Okoro, B.A Abara, A.O. Umagba, A.A. Ajonye
and Z. S. Isa [5] in their publication _A Hybrid approach to
fake news detection on social media using a combination
of both human-based and machine-based approaches.
Since traditional and machine based approaches have
some limitations and can’t single handedly solve the
problems like human literacy and cognitive limitations
and the inadequacy of machine based approach. To solve
all these problems, they proposed a Machine Human (MH)
model for fake news detection in social media. This model
combines the human literacy news detection tool and
machine linguistic and network-based approaches. This
way, the two parallel approaches of detection are at work,
each helping to provide a balance for the other. The
existing system and research work reveal that most
classification algorithms perform well to detect or predict
the fakeness of a news article. Though the logistic
regression serves well for this purpose, our system is
based on this information and thus we focus to work with
classification algorithms like the logistic regression.
3. METHODOLOGY
Fig 3.1: Flow chart of the proposed system
3.1 Data pre-processing
This module contains all the pre processing
functions needed to process all the input documents
and texts. First we read the train, test and validation
data files then perform some pre processing like
tokenizing, stemming etc. There are some
exploratory data analysis is performed like response
variable distribution and data quality checks like null
or missing values etc.
Stemming: In linguistic morphology and information
retrieval, stemming is the process of reducing
inflected (or sometimes derived) words to their word
stem, base or root form—generally a written word
form. The stem need not be identical to
the morphological root of the word; it is usually
sufficient that related words map to the same stem,
even if this stem is not in itself a valid root.
Tokenizing: Tokenization is the process of replacing
sensitive data with unique identification symbols that
retain all the essential information about the data
without compromising its security. Tokenization,
which seeks to minimize the amount of data a
business needs to keep on hand, has become a popular
way for small and mid-sized businesses to bolster the
security of credit card and e-commerce transactions
while minimizing the cost and complexity
of compliance with industry standards and
government regulations.
3.2 Feature Selection
In this module we have performed feature
extraction and selection methods from sci-kit learn
python libraries. For feature selection, we have used
methods like simple bag-of-words and n-grams and
then term frequency like tf-tdf weighting.
Count features:
The CountVectorizer provides a simple way to
both tokenize a collection of text documents and build
a vocabulary of known words, but also to encode new
documents using that vocabulary. You can use it as
follows:
1. Create an instance of the CountVectorizer class.
2. Call the fit() function in order to learn a
vocabulary from one or more documents.
3. Call the transform() function on one or more
documents as needed to encode each as a vector.
An encoded vector is returned with a length of the
entire vocabulary and an integer count for the
number of times each word appeared in the
document. Because these vectors will contain a lot
of zeros, we call them sparse. Python provides an
efficient way of handling sparse vectors in
the scipy.sparse package. The vectors returned
from a call to transform() will be sparse vectors,
and you can transform them back to numpy arrays

to look and better understand what is going on by
calling the toarray() function.
3.3 Classifier
In this module we build all the classifiers for
predicting the fake news detection. The extracted
features are fed into different classifiers. We have
used Logistic Regression classifier from sklearn. Each
of the extracted features were used in the classifier.
Once fitting the model, we compared the f1 score and
checked the confusion matrix. After fitting all the
classifiers, two best performing models were selected
as candidate models for fake news classification.
Finally selected model was used for fake news
detection with the probability of truth. In Addition to
this, we have also extracted the top 50 features from
our term-frequency tfidf Vectorizer to see what words
are most and important in each of the classes. We
have also used Precision-Recall and learning curves to
see how training and test set performs when we
increase the amount of data in our classifiers.
Logistic regression Classifier:
It is a Machine Learning classification algorithm that
is used to predict the probability of a categorical
dependent variable. In logistic regression, the
dependent variable is a binary variable that contains
data coded as 1 (yes, success, etc) or 0 (no, failure, etc.).
In other words, the logistic regression model predicts
P(Y=1) as a function of X.
4. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we’ve used Logistic Regression
classifier which will serve the model and work with the
user input. Here, we’ve presented a detection model for
fake news using TF-IDF analysis through the lenses of
different feature extraction techniques. We have
investigated different feature extraction and machine
learning techniques. The proposed model achieves
accuracy of approximately 72% when using TF-IDF
features and logistic regression classifier.
5. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
We consider it as a privilege to articulate a few
words of gratitude and respect to all those deserving
individuals who guided us in this project. First and
foremost, we would like to extend our profound gratitude
and sincere thanks to our guide Prof. Zameer Ahmed,
Department of computer science and Engineering, AITM
Bhatkal who constantly supported and encouraged us
during every step of dissertation. We really feel highly
indebted to them for constantly guiding us to continue our
work and giving us short term goals.
We are thankful to our project co-ordinator prof.
Bhagwat S G and our HOD prof. Anil Kadle Department
of Computer Science and Engineering, AITM, Bhatkal for
their immense support.
We take this opportunity to thank Dr.M.A
Bhavikatti, Principal, AITM Bhatkal for the
encouragement and useful suggestions to pursue this
work.
6. REFERENCES
[1] Schow, A.: The 4 Types of ‘Fake News’. Observer
(2017). http://observer.com/2017/01/ fake-news-russia-
hacking-clinton-loss/
[2] Fake News Detection on Social Media: A Data Mining
Perspective
Kai Shu, Amy Sliva, Suhang Wang, Jiliang Tang, and Huan
Liu
Computer Science & Engineering, Arizona State University,
Tempe, AZ, USA
Charles River Analytics, Cambridge, MA, USA
Computer Science & Engineering, Michigan State
University, East Lansing, MI, USA
[3] Detection of Online Fake News Using N-Gram Analysis
and Machine Learning Techniques
Hadeer Ahmed, Issa Traore, and Sherif Saad
ECE Department, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC,
Canada
School of Computer Science, University of Windsor,
Windsor, ON, Canada
[4] Verónica Pérez-Rosas, Kleinberg Bennett, Alexandra
Lefevre, and Rada
Mihalcea, ―Automatic detection of fake news,‖
Proceedings of the 27th
International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pp.
3391–3401,
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, 2018.
[5] E. M. Okoro, B. A. Abara, A. O. Umagba, A. A. Ajonye,
and Z. S. Isa,
―A Hybrid Approach to Fake news detection on social
media,‖ vol. 37,
no. 2, pp. 454-462, 2018.

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