Automated and Interpretable Fake News Detection With Explainable Artificial Intelligence

Fake news is a piece of misleading or forged information that affects society, business, governments, etc., hence is an imperative issue. The solution presented here to detect fake news involves purely using rigorous machine learning approaches in implementing a hybrid of simple yet accurate fake text detection models and fake image detection models to detect fake news. The solution considers the text and images of any news article, extracted using web scraping, where the text segment of a news article is analyzed using an ensemble model of the Na & iuml;ve Bayes, Random Forest, and Decision Tree classifier, which showed improved results than the individual models. The image segment of a news article is analyzed using only a Convolution Neural Network, which showed optimal accuracy similar to the text model. To better train the text models, data preprocessing and aggregation methods were used to combine various fake-real news datasets to have ample amounts of data. Similarly, the CASIA dataset was used to train the image model, over which Error Level Analysis was performed to detect fake images. model results are represented as confusion matrices and are measured using various performance metrics. Also, to explain predictions from the hybrid model, Explainable Artificial Intelligence is used.