Tackling Fake News with Machine Learning

Introduction

In today’s fast-paced digital world, spreading fake news has become a significant concern. With the increasing ease of access to social media platforms and other online sources of information, it has become more challenging to distinguish between real and fake news. In this project-based article, we will learn how to build a machine-learning model to detect fake news accurately.

Learning objectives:

1. Understand the basics of natural language processing (NLP) and how it can be used to preprocess textual data for machine learning models.
2. Learn how to use the CountVectorizer class from the scikit-learn library to convert text data into numerical feature vectors.
3. Build a fake news detection system using machine learning algorithms such as logistic regression and evaluate its performance.

This article was published as a part of the Data Science Blogathon.

Table of Contents

1. Project Description
2. Problem Statement
3. Prerequisites
4. Dataset Description
5. Data Collection and Exploration
6. Text Preprocessing
7. Lowercasing the Text
8. Removing Punctuation and Digits
9. Removing Stop Words
10. Stemming or Lemmatizing the Text
11. Model Training
12. Model Evaluation
13. Improving the Model
14. Model Deployment

Project Description

The spread of fake news has become a major concern in today’s society, and it is important to be able to identify news articles that are not based on facts or are intentionally misleading. In this project, we will use machine learning to classify news articles as either real or fake based on their content. By identifying fake news articles, we can prevent the spread of misinformation and help people make more informed decisions.

This project is relevant to the media industry, news outlets, and social media platforms that are responsible for sharing news articles. Classifying news articles as real or fake can help these organizations improve their content moderation and reduce the spread of fake news.

Problem Statement

This project aims to classify news articles as real or fake based on their content. Specifically, we will use machine learning to build a model to predict whether a given news article is real or fake based on its text.

Prerequisites

To complete this project, you should understand Python programming, data manipulation, visualization libraries such as Pandas and Matplotlib, and machine learning libraries such as Scikit-Learn. Additionally, some background knowledge of natural language processing (NLP) techniques and text classification methods would be helpful.

Dataset Description

The dataset used in this project is the “Fake and real news dataset” available on Kaggle, which contains 50,000 news articles labeled as either real or fake. The dataset was collected from various news websites and has been preprocessed to remove extraneous content such as HTML tags, advertisements, and boilerplate text. The dataset provides features such as each news article’s title, text, subject, and publication date. The dataset can be downloaded from the following link: https://www.kaggle.com/clmentbisaillon/fake-and-real-news-dataset.

The steps we will follow in this project are:

1. Data collection and exploration
2. Text preprocessing
3. Feature extraction
4. Model training and evaluation
5. Deployment

1. Data Collection and Exploration

For this project, we will use the Fake and Real News Dataset available on Kaggle. The dataset contains two CSV files: one with real news articles and another with fake news articles. You can download the dataset from this link: https://www.kaggle.com/clmentbisaillon/fake-and-real-news-dataset

Once you have downloaded the dataset, you can load it into a Pandas DataFrame.
The ‘real_news’ DataFrame contains real news articles and their labels, and the ‘fake_news‘ DataFrame contains fake news articles and their labels. Let’s take a look at the first few rows of each DataFrame to get an idea of what the data looks like:

Python Code:

import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# Load the datasets
real_news = pd.read_csv('path_to/True.csv')
fake_news = pd.read_csv('path_to/Fake.csv')

# Display the first few rows of each dataset
print("Real News Sample:")
print(real_news.head())

print("\nFake News Sample:")
print(fake_news.head())

# Plot distribution of article lengths
real_news['text_length'] = real_news['text'].str.len()
fake_news['text_length'] = fake_news['text'].str.len()

plt.hist(real_news['text_length'], bins=50, alpha=0.5, label='Real News')
plt.hist(fake_news['text_length'], bins=50, alpha=0.5, label='Fake News')
plt.legend(loc='upper right')
plt.xlabel('Article Length')
plt.ylabel('Frequency')
plt.title('Distribution of Article Lengths')
plt.show()

As we can see, the data contains several columns: the title of the article, the text of the article, the subject of the article, and the date it was published. We will be using the title and text columns to train our model.

Before we can start training our model, we need to do some exploratory data analysis to get a sense of the data. For example, we can plot the distribution of article lengths in each dataset using the following code:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

real_lengths = real_news['text'].apply(len)
fake_lengths = fake_news['text'].apply(len)

plt.hist(real_lengths, bins=50, alpha=0.5, label='Real')
plt.hist(fake_lengths, bins=50, alpha=0.5, label='Fake')
plt.title('Article Lengths')
plt.xlabel('Length')
plt.ylabel('Count')
plt.legend()
plt.show()

The output should look something like this:

As we can see, the length of the articles is highly variable, with some articles being very short (less than 1000 characters) and others being quite long (more than 40,000 characters). We will need to take this into account when preprocessing the text.

We can also look at the most common words in each dataset using the following code:

from collections import Counter
import nltk
#downloading stopwords and punkt
nltk.download('stopwords')
nltk.download('punkt')

def get_most_common_words(texts, num_words=10):
    all_words = []
    for text in texts:
        all_words.extend(nltk.word_tokenize(text.lower()))
    stop_words = set(nltk.corpus.stopwords.words('english'))
    words = [word for word in all_words if word.isalpha() and word not in stop_words]
    word_counts = Counter(words)
    return word_counts.most_common(num_words)

real_words = get_most_common_words(real_news['text'])
fake_words = get_most_common_words(fake_news['text'])

print('Real News:', real_words)
print('Fake News:', fake_words)

The output should look something like this:

Real News: [('trump', 32505), ('said', 15757), ('us', 15247), 
('president', 12788), ('would', 12337), ('people', 10749), 
('one', 10681), ('also', 9927), ('new', 9825), ('state', 9820)]
Fake News: [('trump', 10382), ('said', 7161), ('hillary', 3890),
 ('clinton', 3588), ('one', 3466), ('people', 3305), ('would', 3257),
  ('us', 3073), ('like', 3056), ('also', 3005)]

As we can see, some of the most common words in both datasets are related to politics and the current US president, Donald Trump. However, there are some differences between the two datasets, with the fake news dataset containing more references to Hillary Clinton and a greater use of words like “like”.

Model Performance without removing stopwords(used logistic regression)

Accuracy: 0.9953
Precision: 0.9940
Recall: 0.9963
F1 Score: 0.9951

2. Text Preprocessing

Before we can start training our model, we need to preprocess the text data. The preprocessing steps we will perform are:

1. Lowercasing the text
2. Removing punctuation and digits
3. Removing stop words
4. Stemming or lemmatizing the text

Lowercasing the Text

Lowercasing the text refers to converting all the letters in a piece of text to lowercase. This is a common text preprocessing step that can be useful for improving the accuracy of text classification models. For example, “Hello” and “hello” would be considered two different words by a model that does not account for case, whereas if the text is converted to lowercase, they would be treated as the same word.

Removing Punctuation and Digits

Removing punctuation and digits refers to removing non-alphabetic characters from a text. This can be useful for reducing the complexity of the text and making it easier for a model to analyze. For example, the words “Hello,” and “Hello!” would be considered different words by a text analysis model if it doesn’t account for the punctuation.

Removing Stop Words

Stop words are words that are very common in a language and do not carry much meaning, such as “the”, “and”, “in”, etc. Removing stop words from a piece of text can help reduce the dimensionality of the data and focus on the most important words in the text. This can also help improve the accuracy of a text classification model by reducing noise in the data.

Stemming or Lemmatizing the Text

Stemming and lemmatizing are common techniques for reducing words to their base form. Stemming involves removing the suffixes of words to produce a stem or root word. For example, the word “jumping” would be stemmed to “jump.” This technique can be useful for reducing the dimensionality of the data, but it can sometimes result in stems that are not actual words.

Conversely, Lemmatizing involves reducing words to their base form using a dictionary or morphological analysis. For example, the word “jumping” would be lemmatized to “jump”, which is an actual word. This technique can be more accurate than stemming but also more computationally expensive.

Both stemming and lemmatizing can reduce the dimensionality of text data and make it easier for a model to analyze. However, it is important to note that they can sometimes result in loss of information, so it is important to experiment with both techniques and determine which works best for a particular text classification problem.

We will perform these steps using the NLTK library, which provides various text-processing tools.

from nltk.corpus import stopwords
from nltk.tokenize import word_tokenize
from nltk.stem import PorterStemmer, WordNetLemmatizer
import string

nltk.download('wordnet')

stop_words = set(stopwords.words('english'))
stemmer = PorterStemmer()
lemmatizer = WordNetLemmatizer()

def preprocess_text(text):
    # Lowercase the text
    text = text.lower()

    # Remove punctuation and digits
    text = text.translate(str.maketrans('', '', string.punctuation + string.digits))

    # Tokenize the text
    words = word_tokenize(text)

    # Remove stop words
    words = [word for word in words if word not in stop_words]

    # Stem or lemmatize the words
    words = [stemmer.stem(word) for word in words]
   
        # Join the words back into a string
    text = ' '.join(words)

    return text

We can now apply this preprocessing function to each article in our datasets:

real_news['text'] = real_news['text'].apply(preprocess_text)
fake_news['text'] = fake_news['text'].apply(preprocess_text)

3. Model Training

We can train our model now that we have preprocessed our text data. We will use a simple bag-of-words approach, representing each article as a vector of word frequencies. We will use the CountVectorizer class from the sklearn library to convert the preprocessed text into feature vectors.

CountVectorizer is a commonly used text preprocessing technique in natural language processing. It transforms a collection of text documents into a matrix of word counts. Each row in the matrix represents a document, and each column represents a word in the document collection.

The CountVectorizer converts a collection of text documents into a matrix of token counts. It works by first tokenizing the text into words and then counting the frequency of each word in each document. The resulting matrix can be used as input to machine learning algorithms for tasks such as text classification.

The CountVectorizer has several parameters that can be adjusted to customize the text preprocessing. For example, the “stop_words” parameter can be used to specify a list of words that should be removed from the text before counting. The “max_df” parameter can specify the maximum document frequency for a word, beyond which the word is considered a stop word and removed from the text.

One advantage of CountVectorizer is that it is simple to use and works well for many types of text classification problems. It is also very efficient regarding memory usage, as it only stores the frequency counts of each word in each document. Another advantage is that it is easy to interpret, as the resulting matrix can be directly inspected to understand the importance of different words in the classification process.

Other methods for converting textual data into numerical features include TF-IDF (term frequency-inverse document frequency), Word2Vec, Doc2Vec, and GloVe (Global Vectors for Word Representation).

TF-IDF is similar to CountVectorizer, but instead of just counting the frequency of each word, it considers how often the word appears in the entire corpus and assigns a weight to each word based on how important it is in the document.

Word2Vec and Doc2Vec are methods for learning low-dimensional vector representations of words and documents that capture the underlying semantic relationships between them.

GloVe is another method for learning vector representations of words that combines the advantages of TF-IDF and Word2Vec.

Each method has its advantages and disadvantages, and the choice of method depends on the problem and dataset at hand. For this dataset, we are using CountVectorizer as follows:

from sklearn.feature_extraction.text import CountVectorizer
import scipy.sparse as sp
import numpy as np

vectorizer = CountVectorizer()
X_real = vectorizer.fit_transform(real_news['text'])
X_fake = vectorizer.transform(fake_news['text'])

X = sp.vstack([X_real, X_fake])
y = np.concatenate([np.ones(X_real.shape[0]), np.zeros(X_fake.shape[0])])

Here, we first create a CountVectorizer object and fit it to the preprocessed text in the real news dataset. We then use the same vectorizer to transform the preprocessed text in the fake news dataset. We then stack the feature matrices for both datasets vertically and create a corresponding label vector, y.

Now that we have our feature and label vectors, we can split the data into training and testing sets:

from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split

X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(X, y, test_size=0.2, random_state=42)

We can now train our model using a logistic regression classifier:

from sklearn.linear_model import LogisticRegression

clf = LogisticRegression(random_state=42)
clf.fit(X_train, y_train)

4. Model Evaluation

Now that we have trained our model, we can evaluate its performance on the test set. We will use our evaluation metrics for accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score.

from sklearn.metrics import accuracy_score, precision_score, recall_score, f1_score

y_pred = clf.predict(X_test)

accuracy = accuracy_score(y_test, y_pred)
precision = precision_score(y_test, y_pred)
recall = recall_score(y_test, y_pred)
f1 = f1_score(y_test, y_pred)

print('Accuracy:', accuracy)
print('Precision:', precision)
print('Recall:', recall)
print('F1 Score:', f1)

The output should look something like this:

Accuracy: 0.992522617676591
Precision: 0.9918478260869565
Recall: 0.9932118684430505
F1 Score: 0.9925293344993434

As we can see, our model performs very well, with an accuracy of over 99%.

Our dataset achieved a test accuracy of over 99%, indicating that the model can accurately classify news articles as real or fake.

Improving the Model

While our logistic regression model achieved high accuracy on the test set, there are several ways we could potentially improve its performance:

• Feature engineering: Instead of using a bag-of-words approach, we could use more advanced text representations, such as word embeddings or topic models, which may capture more nuanced relationships between words.
• Hyperparameter tuning: We could tune the hyperparameters of the logistic regression model using methods such as grid search or randomized search to find the optimal set of parameters for our dataset.

from sklearn.naive_bayes import MultinomialNB
from sklearn.linear_model import LogisticRegression
from sklearn.svm import SVC
# Define a function to train and evaluate a model
def train_and_evaluate_model(model, X_train, y_train, X_test, y_test):
    # Train the model on the training data
    model.fit(X_train, y_train)
    
    # Predict the labels for the testing data
    y_pred = model.predict(X_test)
    
    # Evaluate the model
    accuracy = accuracy_score(y_test, y_pred)
    precision = precision_score(y_test, y_pred, average='weighted')
    recall = recall_score(y_test, y_pred, average='weighted')
    f1 = f1_score(y_test, y_pred, average='weighted')
    
    # Print the evaluation metrics
    print(f"Accuracy: {accuracy:.4f}")
    print(f"Precision: {precision:.4f}")
    print(f"Recall: {recall:.4f}")
    print(f"F1-score: {f1:.4f}")
# Train and evaluate a Multinomial Naive Bayes model
print("Training and evaluating Multinomial Naive Bayes model...")
nb = MultinomialNB()
train_and_evaluate_model(nb, X_train, y_train, X_test, y_test)
print()

# Train and evaluate a Support Vector Machine model
print("Training and evaluating Support Vector Machine model...")
svm = SVC()
train_and_evaluate_model(svm,  X_train, y_train, X_test, y_test)

And the results are:

I have added a code snippet to tune hyperparameters using GridSearchCV. You also use RandomSearchCV or BayesSearchCV to tune the hyperparameters.

from sklearn.model_selection import GridSearchCV

# Define a list of hyperparameters to search over
hyperparameters = {
    'penalty': ['l1', 'l2'],
    'C': [0.1, 1, 10, 100],
    'solver': ['liblinear', 'saga']
}

# Perform grid search to find the best hyperparameters
grid_search = GridSearchCV(LogisticRegression(), hyperparameters, cv=5)
grid_search.fit(X_train, y_train)

# Print the best hyperparameters and test accuracy
print('Best hyperparameters:', grid_search.best_params_)
print('Test accuracy:', grid_search.score(X_test, y_test))

Experimenting with these methods may improve our model’s accuracy even further.

Saving our model:

from joblib import dump

dump(clf, 'model.joblib')
dump(vectorizer, 'vectorizer.joblib')

The dump function from the joblib library can be used to save the clf model to the model.joblib file. Once the model is saved, it can be loaded in other Python scripts using the load function, as shown in the previous answer.

5. Model Deployment

Finally, we can deploy our model as a web application using the Flask framework. We will create a simple web form where users can input text, and the model will output whether the text is likely to be real or fake news.

from flask import Flask, request, render_template
from joblib import load
from nltk.corpus import stopwords
from nltk.tokenize import word_tokenize
from nltk.stem import PorterStemmer, WordNetLemmatizer
import string

stop_words = set(stopwords.words('english'))
stemmer = PorterStemmer()
lemmatizer = WordNetLemmatizer()

clf = load('model.joblib')
vectorizer = load('vectorizer.joblib')
def preprocess_text(text):
    # Lowercase the text
    text = text.lower()

    # Remove punctuation and digits
    text = text.translate(str.maketrans('', '', string.punctuation + string.digits))

    # Tokenize the text
    words = word_tokenize(text)

    # Remove stop words
    words = [word for word in words if word not in stop_words]

    # Stem or lemmatize the words
    words = [stemmer.stem(word) for word in words]
   
        # Join the words back into a string
    text = ' '.join(words)

    return text


app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/')
def home():
    return render_template('home.html')

@app.route('/predict', methods=['POST'])
def predict():
    text = request.form['text']
    preprocessed_text = preprocess_text(text)
    X = vectorizer.transform([preprocessed_text])
    y_pred = clf.predict(X)
    if y_pred[0]== 1:
        result = 'real'
    else:
        result = 'fake'
    return render_template('result.html', result=result, text=text)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run(debug=True)

We can save the above code in a file named `app.py.` We also need to create two HTML templates, `home.html` and `result.html`, containing the HTML code for the home page and the result page, respectively.

home.html

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <title>Real or Fake News</title>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>Real or Fake News</h1>
    <form action="/predict" method="post">
        <label for="text">Enter text:</label><br>
        <textarea name="text" rows="10" cols="50"></textarea><br>
        <input type="submit" value="Submit">
    </form>
</body>
</html>

result.html

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <title>Real or Fake News</title>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>Real or Fake News</h1>
    <p>The text you entered:</p>
    <p>{{ text }}</p>
    <p>The model predicts that this text is:</p>
    <p>{{ result }}</p>
</body>
</html>

We can now run the Flask app using the command python app.py in the command line. The app should be accessible at http://localhost:5000.

Home Page:

Predict Page:

Conclusion

• Preprocessing is an essential step in natural languages processing tasks such as text classification, and techniques such as lowercasing, removing stop words, and stemming/lemmatizing can significantly improve the performance of models.
• CountVectorizer is a powerful tool for converting text data into a numerical representation that can be used in machine learning models.
• The choice of a machine learning algorithm can significantly impact the performance of a text classification task. In this project, we compared the performance of logistic regression and support vector machines and found that logistic regression had the best performance.
• Model evaluation is critical to understanding the performance of a machine learning model and identifying areas for improvement. In this project, we used metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score to evaluate our models.
• Finally, this project demonstrates the potential of machine learning for automated fake news detection and its potential applications in the media industry and beyond.

In this blog post, we learned how to train a simple logistic regression model to classify news articles as real or fake and how to deploy the model as a web application using the Flask framework. We used the sklearn library for preprocessing and modeling the data and created a simple web form using HTML and Flask.

The dataset we used for this project was the Fake and real news dataset from Kaggle, which contains 23481 real news articles and 21417 fake news articles. We preprocessed the text by removing stop words, punctuation, and numbers and then used a bag-of-words approach to represent each article as a vector of word frequencies. We trained a logistic regression classifier on this data and achieved an accuracy of over 99%.

Overall, this project demonstrates how machine learning can be used to tackle the problem of fake news, which is becoming an increasingly important issue in today’s society.

The media shown in this article is not owned by Analytics Vidhya and is used at the Author’s discretion.

sagar tate

Hi,
I am a certified TensorFlow Developer, GCP Associate Engineer, and GCP Machine Learning Engineer.

In terms of GCP knowledge, I have experience working with various GCP services such as Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, App Engine, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, and Cloud SQL. I have experience with cloud-native data processing tools such as Dataflow and Apache Beam. I am also proficient in using Cloud SDK and Cloud Shell for deploying and managing GCP resources. I have hands-on experience in setting up and managing GCP projects, creating and managing virtual machines, configuring load balancers, and managing storage.

In terms of machine learning, I have experience working with a wide range of algorithms, including supervised and unsupervised learning, deep learning, and natural language processing. I have also worked on a variety of projects, including image classification, sentiment analysis, and predictive modeling.

As for web scraping, I have experience using a variety of tools and libraries, including Scrapy, BeautifulSoup, and Selenium. I have also worked with APIs and can handle data cleaning, preprocessing, and visualization.

Thank you for your time.