Fast Naïve Bayes classifiers for COVID-19 news in social networks

Abstract

The growth of fake news has emerged as a substantial societal concern, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Fake news can lead to unwarranted panic, misinformed decisions, and a general state of confusion among the public. Existing methods to detect and filter out fake news have accuracy, speed, and data distribution limitations. This study explores a fast and reliable approach based on Naïve Bayes algorithms for fake news detection on COVID-19 news in social networks. The study used a dataset of 10,700 tweets and applied text pre-processing, term-weighting, document frequency thresholding (DFT), and synthetic minority oversampling techniques (SMOTE) to prepare the data for classification. The study assessed the performance and runtime of four models: gradient boosting (GDBT), decision tree (DT), multinomial Naïve Bayes (MNB), and complement Naïve Bayes (CNB). The testing results showed that the CNB model reaches the highest accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score of approximately 92% each, with the shortest runtime of 0.55 seconds. This study highlights the potential of the CNB model as an effective tool for detecting online fake news about COVID-19, given its superior performance and rapid processing time.