Social Network Analysis and Mining (2020) 1020 aps/do\.og/10.1007/513278-020-00634-« ORIGINAL PAPER Earlier detection of rumors in online social networks using certainty-factor-based convolutional neural networks S.Santhoshkumar’ LD. Dhinesh Babu! Recelved: 28 January 2019 / Revised: 11 March 2020/ Accepted: 12 March 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria, part of Springer Nature 2020 Abstract ‘The rampant propagation of rumors in online social networks leads to potential damage to society. This phenomenon has attracted significant attention to the researches on faster rumor detection, Most recent works on rumor detection adapted. the neural network-based deep learning approaches because of its high success rate. Though neural network-based models have high success rates, these models are less efficient in firding rumors at the earliest. Such models require huge training data for better and accurate results. Unfortunately, the data available in the early stages of rumor propagation are sparse in nature. This nature makes rumor detection using neural networks a complex solution, therefore rendering less efficiency for carly stage rumors. To address this issue, we have propose¢ a certainty-factor-based convolutional neural network (CNN) approach to efficiently classify events as rumor or not by leveraging the inherent features ofthe set of information in spite of data sparsity. The certainty-factor-based activation function requires a minimum number of training data to obtain a gener alization. In the proposed approach, two parallel CNNs are employed for the rumor event classification task that efficiently utilizes the inlcrent features of information, such as temporal, content, and propagation features. A decision tree combines the outputs of both CNNs and provides the classification output. This rumor event classification approach is then compared With recent and well-known state-of-the-art rumor classification approaches, and the results prove thatthe proposed approach detects rumor efficiently and rapidly with minimal inputs compared to other approaches Keywords Rumor - Cyber security - Classification - Neural networks - Online soclal networks Certalnry factor Convolutional neural network 1 Introduction ‘The strong emergence of the internet and mobile devices has originated mimerons online social networking applica tions, through which huge information is shared daily. Such exacerbated information sharing in online social networks (OSNs) facilitates explosive permeates of rumors to larger communities of users (Koohang and Weiss 2003). These Jisance among people and hinder them from the actual information. Discriminating such rumors from true information in OSNs is a challenging task due to its rapid propagation along with credible information © LD. Dhinesh ab ahineshbabue@ gmail.com S. Sanhoshtawmar santhoshramuk@ gmail.com Schoo! of Infrmation Technolosy and Institue of Technology, Vellore, India pineerng. Vellore Published online: 18 March 2020 Consequently, identifying rumors in OSNs have become a recent research interest among academicians and industry experts. Rumor identification can be of great help in creat- ing effective tools to control and prevent the spreading of inaccurate information, Rumors normally refer to information or a statement which is deliberately false, or whose truth-value is unverifi- able atthe time of circulation (DiFonzo and Borda 2007). ‘The rumor identification problem is generally modeled as a binary (Castillo et al. 2011; Chen et al. 2018) or higher classification (Ma et al. 2017; Hassan et al. 2015) prob- Jem of machine learning, Such models consider one or more features of the information for the classification task. Iden- ‘ifying rumors in their initial stages of spreading is impera tive to take necessary actions with minor damages to the network (Ma et al. 2018a). It will be increasingly harder to control the rumors when it reaches a larger number of peo= ple. For example, in May 2018 (DeccanChronicle. hiips:!! ‘www.deceanchronicle), around $8 students were injured in © springer