Abstract
COVID-19 has become one of the most highly orated subject matter in these days. Countries have taken many viable actions to prevent the spread of the virus directed by international recommendations, which led to many disputes concerning wearing a face mask as a preventive measure against the virus. This study aims to assess and compare the overall accuracy, macro precision, macro F-measure and macro recall of the different decision models towards the COVID-19 mask-wearing practices via sentiment analysis. Tweets are labeled and text pre-processing techniques are applied as stemming, normalization, tokenization, and stop-word removal. Subsequently, the tweets are transformed into master feature vectors by applying various feature extraction, feature representation, feature selection and word embedding techniques with five supervised machine learning decision models to predict mask wearing practices reinforced from Twitter tweets. Moreover, the highest macro F-measure and macro precision are found with feature extraction as hybrid-grams, feature representation as TF-IDF, feature selection as Chi-Squared Test, and highest macro recall with feature extraction as BOW, feature representation as TF-IDF, feature selection as ANOVA F-value. Hence, this study concludes that the Naive Bayes (NB) algorithm outperforms other decision models with master feature vectors applied. In addition, it also outperforms word embedding techniques.
Highlights
The novel Coronavirus, known as COVID-19, is an emergency respiratory disease that was initially identified in Wuhan, China, on December 19
In training sets, all algorithms comparatively perform better except KNN which struggles with information gain as the feature selection scheme
This study indicates that hybrid-grams and BOW perform well compared to bigram or trigram when applying Chi-squared test, information gain and Anova FValue as feature representation
Summary
The novel Coronavirus, known as COVID-19, is an emergency respiratory disease that was initially identified in Wuhan, China, on December 19. It is considered to be extremely contagious, and its main symptoms include fatigue, fever, dry cough, dyspnea, and myalgia [1]. It spreads by human to human virus transmission. Distancing from a susceptible population is a better way to control the spread of the COVID-19 [2]. There are plenty of non-pharmaceutical approaches available in protecting from the virus. Hand washing and wearing face masks are ways to keep yourself protected from the virus [3]. There is no proper vaccine that has been identified for Covid-19. It is considered a severe illness that leads to many deaths and the healthcare systems
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