Leveraging Bayesian models to classify myths and facts in child development
摘要
Misinformation about child development can misguide parents and educators, influencing early learning practices and beliefs. This study applies data science and probabilistic modelling techniques to distinguish myths from facts within child-development discourse. A curated dataset was compiled from verified educational and health websites and validated by domain experts. Several probabilistic and ensemble models—GaussianNB, MultinomialNB, BaggingNB, XGBoost, and the proposed Multinomial Distribution-based Bayesian Model–Extended (MDBM-X)—were evaluated across multiple feature representations, including Bag-of-Words (BoW), TF-IDF, and word embeddings. MDBM-X refines the traditional Multinomial Naïve Bayes (MNB) framework through optimised smoothing (