Normalized Effect Size (NES): a novel feature selection model for Urdu fake news classification

Social media has become an essential source of news for everyday users. However, the rise of fake news on social media has made it more difficult for users to trust the information on these platforms. Most research studies focus on fake news detection for the English language, and only limited studies deal with fake news for resource-poor languages such as Urdu. This paper proposes a globally weighted term selection approach (Normalized Effect Size - NES) to select highly discriminative features for Urdu fake news classification. The proposed model is based on the traditional inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) weighting measure. TF-IDF transforms the textual data into a weighted term-document matrix and is usually prone to the curse of dimensionality. Our novel statistical model filters the most discriminative terms to reduce the data dimensionality and improve the classification accuracy. We compare the proposed approach with the seven well-known feature selection/ranking techniques, namely Normalized Difference Measure (NDM), Bi-normal Separation (BNS), Odds Ratio (OR), GINI, Distinguished Feature Selector (DFS), Information Gain (IG) and Chi square (Chi). Our ensemble-based approach achieves high performance on two benchmark datasets, BET and UFN, achieving an accuracy of 88% and 90%, respectively.