Efficient Multivariate Data Fusion for Misinformation Detection During High Impact Events.

With the evolution of social media, cyberspace has become the de-facto medium for users to communicate during high-impact events such as natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and periods of political unrest. However, during such high-impact events, misinformation on social media can rapidly spread, affecting decision-making and creating social unrest. Identifying the spread of misinformation during high-impact events is a significant data challenge, given the variety of data associated with social media posts. Recent machine learning advances have shown promise for detecting misinformation, however, there are still key limitations that make this a significant challenge. These limitations include the effective and efficient modeling of the underlying non-linear associations of multi-modal data as well as the explainability of a system geared at the detection of misinformation. This paper presents a novel multivariate data fusion framework based on pre-trained deep learning features and a well-structured and parameter-free joint blind source separation method named independent vector analysis, that can reliably respond to this set of limitations. We present the mathematical formulation of the new data fusion algorithm, demonstrate its effectiveness, and present multiple explainability case studies using a popular multi-modal dataset that consists of tweets during several high-impact events.