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Month: September 2018

Can you use Machine Learning to detect Fake News?

Someone recently asked me for assistance with a university project whereby they were asked to predict whether a given article was fake news or not.  They had a target accuracy of 70%.  Since the topic of fake news has been in the news a lot, it made me think about how I would approach this problem and whether it is even possible to use machine learning to identify fake news.  At first glance, this problem might be comparable to spam detection, however the problem is actually much more complicated.  In an article on The VergeDean Pomerleau of Carnegie Mellon University states:

“We actually started out with a more ambitious goal of creating a system that could answer the question ‘Is this fake news, yes or no?’ We quickly realized machine learning just wasn’t up to the task.” 

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