scholarly journals Using Reports of Symptoms and Diagnoses on Social Media to Predict COVID-19 Case Counts in Mainland China: Observational Infoveillance Study (Preprint)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cuihua Shen ◽  
Anfan Chen ◽  
Chen Luo ◽  
Jingwen Zhang ◽  
Bo Feng ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
Hubei Province ◽  
Learning Approaches ◽  
Theoretical Understanding ◽  
Unequal Distribution ◽  
Social Media Data ◽  
Screening And Surveillance ◽  
Media Data

BACKGROUND Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has affected more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. This disease poses an extraordinary challenge for public health systems because screening and surveillance capacity is often severely limited, especially during the beginning of the outbreak; this can fuel the outbreak, as many patients can unknowingly infect other people. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to collect and analyze posts related to COVID-19 on Weibo, a popular Twitter-like social media site in China. To our knowledge, this infoveillance study employs the largest, most comprehensive, and most fine-grained social media data to date to predict COVID-19 case counts in mainland China. METHODS We built a Weibo user pool of 250 million people, approximately half the entire monthly active Weibo user population. Using a comprehensive list of 167 keywords, we retrieved and analyzed around 15 million COVID-19–related posts from our user pool from November 1, 2019 to March 31, 2020. We developed a machine learning classifier to identify “sick posts,” in which users report their own or other people’s symptoms and diagnoses related to COVID-19. Using officially reported case counts as the outcome, we then estimated the Granger causality of sick posts and other COVID-19 posts on daily case counts. For a subset of geotagged posts (3.10% of all retrieved posts), we also ran separate predictive models for Hubei province, the epicenter of the initial outbreak, and the rest of mainland China. RESULTS We found that reports of symptoms and diagnosis of COVID-19 significantly predicted daily case counts up to 14 days ahead of official statistics, whereas other COVID-19 posts did not have similar predictive power. For the subset of geotagged posts, we found that the predictive pattern held true for both Hubei province and the rest of mainland China regardless of the unequal distribution of health care resources and the outbreak timeline. CONCLUSIONS Public social media data can be usefully harnessed to predict infection cases and inform timely responses. Researchers and disease control agencies should pay close attention to the social media infosphere regarding COVID-19. In addition to monitoring overall search and posting activities, leveraging machine learning approaches and theoretical understanding of information sharing behaviors is a promising approach to identify true disease signals and improve the effectiveness of infoveillance.

scholarly journals Using Reports of Symptoms and Diagnoses on Social Media to Predict COVID-19 Case Counts in Mainland China: Observational Infoveillance Study

10.2196/19421 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (5) ◽  
pp. e19421 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cuihua Shen ◽  
Anfan Chen ◽  
Chen Luo ◽  
Jingwen Zhang ◽  
Bo Feng ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
Hubei Province ◽  
Learning Approaches ◽  
Theoretical Understanding ◽  
Unequal Distribution ◽  
Social Media Data ◽  
Screening And Surveillance ◽  
Media Data

Background Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has affected more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. This disease poses an extraordinary challenge for public health systems because screening and surveillance capacity is often severely limited, especially during the beginning of the outbreak; this can fuel the outbreak, as many patients can unknowingly infect other people. Objective The aim of this study was to collect and analyze posts related to COVID-19 on Weibo, a popular Twitter-like social media site in China. To our knowledge, this infoveillance study employs the largest, most comprehensive, and most fine-grained social media data to date to predict COVID-19 case counts in mainland China. Methods We built a Weibo user pool of 250 million people, approximately half the entire monthly active Weibo user population. Using a comprehensive list of 167 keywords, we retrieved and analyzed around 15 million COVID-19–related posts from our user pool from November 1, 2019 to March 31, 2020. We developed a machine learning classifier to identify “sick posts,” in which users report their own or other people’s symptoms and diagnoses related to COVID-19. Using officially reported case counts as the outcome, we then estimated the Granger causality of sick posts and other COVID-19 posts on daily case counts. For a subset of geotagged posts (3.10% of all retrieved posts), we also ran separate predictive models for Hubei province, the epicenter of the initial outbreak, and the rest of mainland China. Results We found that reports of symptoms and diagnosis of COVID-19 significantly predicted daily case counts up to 14 days ahead of official statistics, whereas other COVID-19 posts did not have similar predictive power. For the subset of geotagged posts, we found that the predictive pattern held true for both Hubei province and the rest of mainland China regardless of the unequal distribution of health care resources and the outbreak timeline. Conclusions Public social media data can be usefully harnessed to predict infection cases and inform timely responses. Researchers and disease control agencies should pay close attention to the social media infosphere regarding COVID-19. In addition to monitoring overall search and posting activities, leveraging machine learning approaches and theoretical understanding of information sharing behaviors is a promising approach to identify true disease signals and improve the effectiveness of infoveillance.

Hybrid features prediction model of movie quality using Multi-machine learning techniques for effective business resource planning

2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (5) ◽  
pp. 9361-9382 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naeem Iqbal ◽  
Rashid Ahmad ◽  
Faisal Jamil ◽  
Do-Hyeun Kim
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Resource Planning ◽  
Experimental Results ◽  
Quality Prediction ◽  
Classification Models ◽  
Hybrid Features ◽  
Social Media Data ◽  
Media Data

Quality prediction plays an essential role in the business outcome of the product. Due to the business interest of the concept, it has extensively been studied in the last few years. Advancement in machine learning (ML) techniques and with the advent of robust and sophisticated ML algorithms, it is required to analyze the factors influencing the success of the movies. This paper presents a hybrid features prediction model based on pre-released and social media data features using multiple ML techniques to predict the quality of the pre-released movies for effective business resource planning. This study aims to integrate pre-released and social media data features to form a hybrid features-based movie quality prediction (MQP) model. The proposed model comprises of two different experimental models; (i) predict movies quality using the original set of features and (ii) develop a subset of features based on principle component analysis technique to predict movies success class. This work employ and implement different ML-based classification models, such as Decision Tree (DT), Support Vector Machines with the linear and quadratic kernel (L-SVM and Q-SVM), Logistic Regression (LR), Bagged Tree (BT) and Boosted Tree (BOT), to predict the quality of the movies. Different performance measures are utilized to evaluate the performance of the proposed ML-based classification models, such as Accuracy (AC), Precision (PR), Recall (RE), and F-Measure (FM). The experimental results reveal that BT and BOT classifiers performed accurately and produced high accuracy compared to other classifiers, such as DT, LR, LSVM, and Q-SVM. The BT and BOT classifiers achieved an accuracy of 90.1% and 89.7%, which shows an efficiency of the proposed MQP model compared to other state-of-art- techniques. The proposed work is also compared with existing prediction models, and experimental results indicate that the proposed MQP model performed slightly better compared to other models. The experimental results will help the movies industry to formulate business resources effectively, such as investment, number of screens, and release date planning, etc.

scholarly journals Predicting ethnicity with data on personal names in Russia

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexey Bessudnov ◽  
Denis Tarasov ◽  
Viacheslav Panasovets ◽  
Veronica Kostenko ◽  
Ivan Smirnov ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Geographical Location ◽  
Ethnic Relations ◽  
Social Media Data ◽  
Personal Names ◽  
Learning Classifier ◽  
Media Data

In this paper we develop a machine learning classifier that predicts perceived ethnicity from data on personal names for major ethnic groups populating Russia. We collect data from VK, the largest Russian social media website. Ethnicity has been determined from languages spoken by users and their geographical location, with the data manually cleaned by crowd workers. The classifier shows the accuracy of 0.82 for a scheme with 24 ethnic groups and 0.92 for 15 aggregated ethnic groups. It can be used for research on ethnicity and ethnic relations in Russia, in particular with VK and other social media data.

scholarly journals Sentiment Analysis in Social Media using Machine Learning Techniques

2020 ◽  
pp. 193-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hayder A. Alatabi ◽  
Ayad R. Abbas
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Sentiment Analysis ◽  
Machine Learning Techniques ◽  
Great Success ◽  
Social Media Data ◽  
Learning Techniques ◽  
The World ◽  
Analysis System ◽  
Media Data

Over the last period, social media achieved a widespread use worldwide where the statistics indicate that more than three billion people are on social media, leading to large quantities of data online. To analyze these large quantities of data, a special classification method known as sentiment analysis, is used. This paper presents a new sentiment analysis system based on machine learning techniques, which aims to create a process to extract the polarity from social media texts. By using machine learning techniques, sentiment analysis achieved a great success around the world. This paper investigates this topic and proposes a sentiment analysis system built on Bayesian Rough Decision Tree (BRDT) algorithm. The experimental results show the success of this system where the accuracy of the system is more than 95% on social media data.

scholarly journals Communication Sentiment Analyzer using Machine Learning with Naive Bayes Bernoullinb

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 5976-5979
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Major Part ◽  
Naive Bayes ◽  
Naïve Bayes ◽  
User Preferences ◽  
Social Media Data ◽  
Machine Learning Model ◽  
The World ◽  
Media Data

In this never-ending social media era it is estimated that over 5 billion people use smartphones. Out of these, there are over 1.5 billion active users in the world. In which we all are a major part and before opening our messages we all are curious about what message we have received. No doubt, we all always hope for a good message to be received. So Sentiment analysis on social media data has been seen by many as an effective tool to monitor user preferences and inclination. Finally, we propose a scalable machine learning model to analyze the polarity of a communicative text using Naive Bayes’ Bernoulli classifier. This paper works on only two polarities that is whether the sentence is positive or negative. Bernoulli classifier is used in this paper because it is best suited for binary inputs which in turn enhances the accuracy of up to 97%.

scholarly journals Data Mining and Content Analysis of the Chinese Social Media Platform Weibo During the Early COVID-19 Outbreak: Retrospective Observational Infoveillance Study

10.2196/18700 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. e18700 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jiawei Li ◽  
Qing Xu ◽  
Raphael Cuomo ◽  
Vidya Purushothaman ◽  
Tim Mackey
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Quantitative Analysis ◽  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Hubei Province ◽  
Wuhan City ◽  
Social Media Data ◽  
Public Reaction ◽  
Media Data ◽  
Chinese Social Media

Background The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, which began in Wuhan, China in December 2019, is rapidly spreading worldwide with over 1.9 million cases as of mid-April 2020. Infoveillance approaches using social media can help characterize disease distribution and public knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors critical to the early stages of an outbreak. Objective The aim of this study is to conduct a quantitative and qualitative assessment of Chinese social media posts originating in Wuhan City on the Chinese microblogging platform Weibo during the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak. Methods Chinese-language messages from Wuhan were collected for 39 days between December 23, 2019, and January 30, 2020, on Weibo. For quantitative analysis, the total daily cases of COVID-19 in Wuhan were obtained from the Chinese National Health Commission, and a linear regression model was used to determine if Weibo COVID-19 posts were predictive of the number of cases reported. Qualitative content analysis and an inductive manual coding approach were used to identify parent classifications of news and user-generated COVID-19 topics. Results A total of 115,299 Weibo posts were collected during the study time frame consisting of an average of 2956 posts per day (minimum 0, maximum 13,587). Quantitative analysis found a positive correlation between the number of Weibo posts and the number of reported cases from Wuhan, with approximately 10 more COVID-19 cases per 40 social media posts (P<.001). This effect size was also larger than what was observed for the rest of China excluding Hubei Province (where Wuhan is the capital city) and held when comparing the number of Weibo posts to the incidence proportion of cases in Hubei Province. Qualitative analysis of 11,893 posts during the first 21 days of the study period with COVID-19-related posts uncovered four parent classifications including Weibo discussions about the causative agent of the disease, changing epidemiological characteristics of the outbreak, public reaction to outbreak control and response measures, and other topics. Generally, these themes also exhibited public uncertainty and changing knowledge and attitudes about COVID-19, including posts exhibiting both protective and higher-risk behaviors. Conclusions The results of this study provide initial insight into the origins of the COVID-19 outbreak based on quantitative and qualitative analysis of Chinese social media data at the initial epicenter in Wuhan City. Future studies should continue to explore the utility of social media data to predict COVID-19 disease severity, measure public reaction and behavior, and evaluate effectiveness of outbreak communication.

scholarly journals Assessing Patient-Perceived Hospital Service Quality and Sentiment in Malaysian Public Hospitals Using Machine Learning and Facebook Reviews

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (18) ◽  
pp. 9912
Author(s):  
Afiq Izzudin A. Rahim ◽  
Mohd Ismail Ibrahim ◽  
Kamarul Imran Musa ◽  
Sook-Ling Chua ◽  
Najib Majdi Yaacob
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Quality Of Care ◽  
Service Quality ◽  
Hospital Quality ◽  
Public Hospitals ◽  
Social Media Data ◽  
Positive Sentiment ◽  
Media Data

Social media is emerging as a new avenue for hospitals and patients to solicit input on the quality of care. However, social media data is unstructured and enormous in volume. Moreover, no empirical research on the use of social media data and perceived hospital quality of care based on patient online reviews has been performed in Malaysia. The purpose of this study was to investigate the determinants of positive sentiment expressed in hospital Facebook reviews in Malaysia, as well as the association between hospital accreditation and sentiments expressed in Facebook reviews. From 2017 to 2019, we retrieved comments from 48 official public hospitals’ Facebook pages. We used machine learning to build a sentiment analyzer and service quality (SERVQUAL) classifier that automatically classifies the sentiment and SERVQUAL dimensions. We utilized logistic regression analysis to determine our goals. We evaluated a total of 1852 reviews and our machine learning sentiment analyzer detected 72.1% of positive reviews and 27.9% of negative reviews. We classified 240 reviews as tangible, 1257 reviews as trustworthy, 125 reviews as responsive, 356 reviews as assurance, and 1174 reviews as empathy using our machine learning SERVQUAL classifier. After adjusting for hospital characteristics, all SERVQUAL dimensions except Tangible were associated with positive sentiment. However, no significant relationship between hospital accreditation and online sentiment was discovered. Facebook reviews powered by machine learning algorithms provide valuable, real-time data that may be missed by traditional hospital quality assessments. Additionally, online patient reviews offer a hitherto untapped indication of quality that may benefit all healthcare stakeholders. Our results confirm prior studies and support the use of Facebook reviews as an adjunct method for assessing the quality of hospital services in Malaysia.

scholarly journals Suicide Risk and Protective Factors in Online Support Forum Posts: Annotation Scheme Development and Validation Study (Preprint)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stevie Chancellor ◽  
Steven A Sumner ◽  
Corinne David-Ferdon ◽  
Tahirah Ahmad ◽  
Munmun De Choudhury
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Machine Learning ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Protective Factors ◽  
Suicide Risk ◽  
Risk And Protective Factors ◽  
Prior Work ◽  
Annotation Scheme ◽  
Social Media Data ◽  
Media Data

BACKGROUND Online communities provide support for individuals looking for help with suicidal ideation and crisis. As community data are increasingly used to devise machine learning models to infer who might be at risk, there have been limited efforts to identify both risk and protective factors in web-based posts. These annotations can enrich and augment computational assessment approaches to identify appropriate intervention points, which are useful to public health professionals and suicide prevention researchers. OBJECTIVE This qualitative study aims to develop a valid and reliable annotation scheme for evaluating risk and protective factors for suicidal ideation in posts in suicide crisis forums. METHODS We designed a valid, reliable, and clinically grounded process for identifying risk and protective markers in social media data. This scheme draws on prior work on construct validity and the social sciences of measurement. We then applied the scheme to annotate 200 posts from r/SuicideWatch—a Reddit community focused on suicide crisis. RESULTS We documented our results on producing an annotation scheme that is consistent with leading public health information coding schemes for suicide and advances attention to protective factors. Our study showed high internal validity, and we have presented results that indicate that our approach is consistent with findings from prior work. CONCLUSIONS Our work formalizes a framework that incorporates construct validity into the development of annotation schemes for suicide risk on social media. This study furthers the understanding of risk and protective factors expressed in social media data. This may help public health programming to prevent suicide and computational social science research and investigations that rely on the quality of labels for downstream machine learning tasks.

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