CoAID-DEEP: An Optimized Intelligent Framework for Automated Detecting COVID-19 Misleading Information on Twitter

Abstract

COVID-19 has affected all peoples' lives. Though COVID-19 is on the rising, the existence of misinformation about the virus also grows in parallel. Additionally, the spread of misinformation has created confusion among people, caused disturbances in society, and even led to deaths. Social media is central to our daily lives. The Internet has become a significant source of knowledge. Owing to the widespread damage caused by fake news, it is important to build computerized systems to detect fake news. The paper proposes an updated deep neural network for identification of false news. The deep learning techniques are The Modified-LSTM (one to three layers) and The Modified GRU (one to three layers). In particular, we carry out investigations of a large dataset of tweets passing on data with respect to COVID-19. In our study, we separate the dubious claims into two categories: true and false. We compare the performance of the various algorithms in terms of prediction accuracy. The six machine learning techniques are decision trees, logistic regression, k nearest neighbors, random forests, support vector machines, and naïve Bayes (NB). The parameters of deep learning techniques are optimized using Keras-tuner. Four Benchmark datasets were used. Two feature extraction methods were used (TF-ID with N-gram) to extract essential features from the four benchmark datasets for the baseline machine learning model and word embedding feature extraction method for the proposed deep neural network methods. The results obtained with the proposed framework reveal high accuracy in detecting Fake and non-Fake tweets containing COVID-19 information. These results demonstrate significant improvement as compared to the existing state of art results of baseline machine learning models. In our approach, we classify the data into two categories: fake or nonfake. We compare the execution of the proposed approaches with Six machine learning procedures. The six machine learning procedures are Decision Tree (DT), Logistic Regression (LR), K Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Naive Bayes (NB). The parameters of deep learning techniques are optimized using Keras-tuner. Four Benchmark datasets were used. Two feature extraction methods were used (TF-ID with N-gram) to extract essential features from the four benchmark datasets for the baseline machine learning model and word embedding feature extraction method for the proposed deep neural network methods. The results obtained with the proposed framework reveal high accuracy in detecting Fake and non-Fake tweets containing COVID-19 information. These results demonstrate significant improvement as compared to the existing state of art results of baseline machine learning models.

Keywords: COVID-19; Fake news; deep learning; misleading information; pandemic; social media.