Analysis and Classification of Fake News Using Sequential Pattern Mining

Disinformation, often known as fake news, is a major issue that has received a lot of attention lately. Many researchers have proposed effective means of detecting and addressing it. Current machine and deep learning based methodologies for classification/detection of fake news are content-based, network (propagation) based, or multimodal methods that combine both textual and visual information. We introduce here a framework, called FNACSPM, based on sequential pattern mining (SPM), for fake news analysis and classification. In this framework, six publicly available datasets, containing a diverse range of fake and real news, and their combination, are first transformed into a proper format. Then, algorithms for SPM are applied to the transformed datasets to extract frequent patterns (and rules) of words, phrases, or linguistic features. The obtained patterns capture distinctive characteristics associated with fake or real news content, providing valuable insights into the underlying structures and commonalities of misinformation. Subsequently, the discovered frequent patterns are used as features for fake news classification. This framework is evaluated with eight classifiers, and their performance is assessed with various metrics. Extensive experiments were performed and obtained results show that FNACSPM outperformed other state-of-the-art approaches for fake news classification, and that it expedites the classification task with high accuracy.