An Optimized Hybrid Deep Learning Model to Detect COVID-19 Misleading Information

Abstract

Fake news is challenging to detect due to mixing accurate and inaccurate information from reliable and unreliable sources. Social media is a data source that is not trustworthy all the time, especially in the COVID-19 outbreak. During the COVID-19 epidemic, fake news is widely spread. The best way to deal with this is early detection. Accordingly, in this work, we have proposed a hybrid deep learning model that uses convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) to detect COVID-19 fake news. The proposed model consists of some layers: an embedding layer, a convolutional layer, a pooling layer, an LSTM layer, a flatten layer, a dense layer, and an output layer. For experimental results, three COVID-19 fake news datasets are used to evaluate six machine learning models, two deep learning models, and our proposed model. The machine learning models are DT, KNN, LR, RF, SVM, and NB, while the deep learning models are CNN and LSTM. Also, four matrices are used to validate the results: accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-measure. The conducted experiments show that the proposed model outperforms the six machine learning models and the two deep learning models. Consequently, the proposed system is capable of detecting the fake news of COVID-19 significantly.