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Tag: Big Data

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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Announcing the First Release of Griffon: A Virtual Environment for Data Science

My colleagues Austin Taylor and Melissa Kilby are proud to announce the first stable release of Griffon:  A Virtual Machine for Data Science.   Griffon is a virtual machine which contains many data science tools pre-configured, installed and linked up to make it so that you don’t have to be a Linux expert to try them out.  If you are teaching a class, or if you are simply wanting to learn more about a particular tool, then Griffon is perfect for you.

You can download Griffon here: https://github.com/gtkcyber/griffon-vm.

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