Predicting the pandemic: sentiment evaluation and predictive analysis from large-scale tweets on Covid-19 by deep convolutional neural network

Abstract

Engaging deep neural networks for textual sentiment analysis is an extensively practiced domain of research. Textual sentiment classification harnesses the full computational potential of deep learning models. Typically, these research works are carried either with a popular open-source data corpus, or self-extracted short phrase texts from Twitter, Reddit, or web-scrapped text data from other resources. Rarely do we see a large amount of data on a current ongoing event is being collected and cultured further. Also, an even more complex task would be to model the data from a currently ongoing event, not only for scaling the sentiment accuracy but also for making a predictive analysis for the same. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for achieving sentiment evaluation accuracy by using a deep neural network on live-streamed tweets on Coronavirus and future case growth prediction. We develop a large tweet corpus exclusively based on the Coronavirus tweets. We split the data into train and test sets, alongside we perform polarity classification and trend analysis. The refined outcome from the trend analysis helps to train the data to provide an incremental learning curvature for our neural network, and we obtain an accuracy of 90.67%. Finally, we provide a statistical-based future prediction for Coronavirus cases growth. Not only our model outperforms several previous state-of-art experiments in overall sentiment accuracy comparison for similar tasks, but it also maintains a throughout performance stability among all the test cases when tested with several popular open-source text corpora.