Does Neural Complexity Improve Health Misinformation Detection? A Leakage-Controlled Cross-Corpus Benchmark
Mkululi SIKOSANA
Abstract
Increasing architectural complexity is often assumed to improve health misinformation detection, yet reported gains are difficult to interpret when studies use different corpora, preprocessing pipelines, data splits, and leakage controls. This study provides a controlled cross-corpus benchmark of five compact neural architectures (1D-CNN, LSTM, BiLSTM, CNN-LSTM, and CNN-BiLSTM), a soft-voting neural ensemble, and three classical machine-learning baselines using COVID19-FNIR and CONSTRAINT. Exact-text duplicate controls were applied before modelling; all neural systems used a common preprocessing and optimisation protocol, and neural results were repeated across three random seeds. On COVID19-FNIR, the deep ensemble achieved a mean macro-F1 of 0.9963 and ROC-AUC of 0.9994, while individual neural models ranged from 0.9945 to 0.9957 macro-F1. On CONSTRAINT, the ensemble achieved macro-F1 of 0.9272 and ROC-AUC of 0.9811, whereas a linear SVM achieved macro-F1 of 0.9574 and ROC-AUC of 0.9931. Architecture rankings changed across corpora, and simple sparse linear models remained highly competitive. The findings show that model complexity does not provide a stable performance advantage and that benchmark construction can dominate architecture choice. The study contributes a reproducible, leakage-controlled basis for evidence-driven model selection in health misinformation classification