made a readme for info and clarity

readme.md

@@ -1,7 +1,74 @@
-SENTINELCHECK API - Ensemble model fake review prediction for small businesses. 
+## SENTINEL-CHECK API
+
+**Ensemble model fake review detection for small businesses.**
+
+## Presidential AI Challenge Submission
 
 THIS IS SOLELY FOR SUBMISSION TO THE PRESIDENTIAL AI CHALLENGE!
 
-This is deployed and final iteration of our submission, any other commits after the submission date are generally for maintenence purposes. 
-All documentation on the API can be found on the bottom of the "App" section of this space. A hyperlink style button with the text "use via API" specifically.
+This is the deployed and final iteration of our submission. Any commits after the submission date are generally for maintenance purposes.
+
+All documentation on the API can be found at the bottom of the "App" section of this space - look for the hyperlink button with the text **"use via API"**.
+
+---
+
+## Prediction Meanings:
+
+- `"genuine"` - review is probably authentic
+- `"fake"` - review is probably fake/fraudulent
+- `"uncertain"` - models disagree (agreement < 67%); less than 2/3 models agree.
+
+---
+
+## Model Arch
+
+The API uses an ensemble of three models:
+
+1. **DistilBERT** (distilbert-base-uncased) - max 128 tokens
+2. **RoBERTa** (roberta-base) - max 192 tokens
+3. **BERT** (bert-base-uncased) - max 256 tokens
+
+**Ensemble Strategy:** Equal weighting (0.333 each)  
+**Decision Threshold:** 0.45 for fake classification  
+**Uncertainty Threshold:** 0.67 model agreement req.
+
+Models loaded from HuggingFace Hub here is the link: https://huggingface.co/codingcoolfun9ed/sentinelcheck-models
+
+---
+
+## Performance Metrics
+
+- **Test Accuracy:** 78.26%
+- **Validation Accuracy:** 84.64%
+- **F1 Score:** 0.8531
+- **Model Agreement:** 88.4%
+
+Threshold optimized on validation set. Equal weighting outperformed an accuracy-based weighting approach.
+
+---
+
+## Tech Stack
+
+- **Framework:** Flask + Flask-CORS
+- **ML:** PyTorch, Transformers (HuggingFace)
+- **Models:** BERT, RoBERTa, DistilBERT
+- **Deployment:** Python 3 
+
+---
+
+## Text Preprocessing
+
+Reviews are automatically cleaned:
+
+- URL removal
+- HTML tag removal
+- Punctuation normalization 
+- Whitespace normalization
+
+---
+
+## Author
+
+**codingcoolfun9ed** (Aaban R.) | Submission Date: January 20, 2026
 
+For API documentation and the live demo, visit the app interface and/or click **"use via API"** at the bottom.