Fake news has a worldwide impact and the potential to change political scenarios and human behavior, especially in a critical time like the COVID-19 pandemic. This work suggests a Soft Three-Level Voting Model (Soft T-LVM) for automatically classifying COVID-19 fake news. We train different individual machine learning algorithms and different ensemble methods in order to overcome the weakness of individual models. This novel model is based on the soft-voting technique to calculate the class with the majority of votes and to choose the classifiers to merge and apply at every level. We use the Grid search method to tune the hyper-parameters during the process of classification and voting. The experimental evaluation confirms that our proposed model approach has superior performance compared to the other classifiers.
Keywords: COVID-19.; Ensemble learning models; Fake news detection; Machine learning algorithms; Natural Language Processing (NLP); Social media.
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