Work place: Department of Computer Science & Engineering, HNB Garhwal University (A Central University), Srinagar Garhwal- 246 174, Uttarakhand, India
E-mail: nikita.garg2706@gmail.com
Website: https://orcid.org/0009-0009-1418-2611
Research Interests:
Biography
Nikita Garg is a Research Scholar in the Department of Computer Science at Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna Garhwal University, a Central University, India. She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Computer Science, expected to be completed in September 2026. Her major field of study includes Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and Fake News Detection. I have been actively engaged in research work focusing on feature selection techniques using evolutionary algorithms and swarm intelligence for detecting fake news. Her research contributions include theoretical framework development in the area of information credibility analysis and text classification. Her current research interests include Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Swarm Intelligence, and Evolutionary Computation. I have been honoured with a Young Scientist Award for my outstanding academic and research contributions. I participated in various academic and research activities and continue to contribute to advanced studies in computational intelligence and text analytics.
By Nikita Garg Pritam Singh Negi
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5815/ijeme.2026.04.02, Pub. Date: 8 Aug. 2026
The proliferation of online misinformation demands the development of highly accurate and computationally efficient automated systems for Fake News Detection. A primary impediment to system performance is the high dimensionality of textual features derived from techniques like TF-IDF, making optimal Feature Selection a critical step. This paper presents a detailed comparative experimental study of two prominent bio-inspired evolutionary metaheuristics, the Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Particle Swarm Optimisation (PSO) used as wrapper-based FS techniques for FND. The methodologies were rigorously tested across two distinct textual datasets: the complex, large-scale FakeNewsNet corpus and a moderate-scale general news dataset. The feature sets, once optimised, were evaluated using six standard Machine Learning (ML) classifiers. The GA-based FS approach, emphasising global exploration, achieved state-of-the-art accuracy of 99.91% with the Random Forest classifier on the FakeNewsNet dataset. In contrast, the PSO-based FS approach, valued for its rapid convergence, yielded a maximum accuracy of 93.29% with the Support Vector Machine (SVM) on the general news dataset. This analysis provides empirical evidence of the intrinsic trade-off between the algorithms: GA is superior for maximising accuracy in high-dimensional, complex textual spaces, while PSO offers a more efficient and practical solution for resource-constrained or moderate-scale FND tasks. The study confirms that evolutionary computation provides a robust, effective pathway for significantly enhancing ML classifier performance in this critical domain.
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