Fake news detector

For the one day intern hackathon at MathWorks, we took on a rather nebulous project, one that Facebook’s been working on for a while now: detecting fake news. With a couple of Google searches, we found the Fake News Challenge, which focuses on categorizing pairs of articles and headlines.

Using MATLAB’s machine learning toolbox (specifically, a Naive Bayesian classifier), and some naive sentiment analysis, we were able to categorize 80% of the test cases correctly.

Of course, our project was far from state-of-the-art, but it was still pretty cool to see what we could do. You can check out the project here.