Machine learning (ML) based forecasting mechanisms have proved their significance to anticipate in perioperative outcomes to improve the decision making on the future course of actions. The ML models have long been used in many application domains which needed the identification and prioritization of adverse factors for a threat. Several prediction methods are being popularly used to handle forecasting problems. This study demonstrates the capability of ML models to forecast the number of upcoming patients affected by COVID-19 which is presently considered as a potential threat to mankind. In particular, four standard forecasting models, such as linear regression (LR), least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO), support vector machine (SVM), and exponential smoothing (ES) have been used in this study to forecast the threatening factors of COVID-19. Three types of predictions are made by each of the models, such as the number of newly infected cases, the number of deaths, and the number of recoveries in the next 10 days. The results produced by the study proves it a promising mechanism to use these methods for the current scenario of the COVID-19 pandemic. The results prove that the ES performs best among all the used models followed by LR and LASSO which performs well in forecasting the new confirmed cases, death rate as well as recovery rate, while SVM performs poorly in all the prediction scenarios given the available dataset.

The spread of Covid-19 has resulted in worldwide health concerns. Social media is increasingly used to share news and opinions about it. A realistic assessment of the situation is necessary to utilize resources optimally and appropriately. In this research, we perform Covid-19 tweets sentiment analysis using a supervised machine learning approach. Identification of Covid-19 sentiments from tweets would allow informed decisions for better handling the current pandemic situation. The used dataset is extracted from Twitter using IDs as provided by the IEEE data port. Tweets are extracted by an in-house built crawler that uses the Tweepy library. The dataset is cleaned using the preprocessing techniques and sentiments are extracted using the TextBlob library. The contribution of this work is the performance evaluation of various machine learning classifiers using our proposed feature set. This set is formed by concatenating the bag-of-words and the term frequency-inverse document frequency. Tweets are classified as positive, neutral, or negative. Performance of classifiers is evaluated on the accuracy, precision, recall, andF₁score. For completeness, further investigation is made on the dataset using the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) architecture of the deep learning model. The results show that Extra Trees Classifiers outperform all other models by achieving a 0.93 accuracy score using our proposed concatenated features set. The LSTM achieves low accuracy as compared to machine learning classifiers. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed feature set, the results are compared with the Vader sentiment analysis technique based on the GloVe feature extraction approach.

Society and individuals are negatively influenced both politically and socially by the widespread increase of fake news either way generated by humans or machines. In the era of social networks, the quick rotation of news makes it challenging to evaluate its reliability promptly. Therefore, automated fake news detection tools have become a crucial requirement. To address the aforementioned issue, a hybrid Neural Network architecture, that combines the capabilities of CNN and LSTM, is used with two different dimensionality reduction approaches, Principle Component Analysis (PCA) and Chi-Square. This work proposed to employ the dimensionality reduction techniques to reduce the dimensionality of the feature vectors before passing them to the classifier. To develop the reasoning, this work acquired a dataset from the Fake News Challenges (FNC) website which has four types of stances: agree, disagree, discuss, and unrelated. The nonlinear features are fed to PCA and chi-square which provides more contextual features for fake news detection. The motivation of this research is to determine the relative stance of a news article towards its headline. The proposed model improves results by ~4% and ~20% in terms of $Accuracy$ and $F1-score$ . The experimental results show that PCA outperforms than Chi-square and state-of-the-art methods with 97.8% accuracy.

Efficient word representation techniques (word embeddings) with modern machine learning models have shown reasonable improvement on automatic text classification tasks. However, the effectiveness of such techniques has not been evaluated yet in terms of insufficient word vector representation for training. Convolutional Neural Network has achieved significant results in pattern recognition, image analysis, and text classification. This study investigates the application of the CNN model on text classification problems by experimentation and analysis. We trained our classification model with a prominent word embedding generation model, Fast Text on publically available datasets, six benchmark datasets including Ag News, Amazon Full and Polarity, Yahoo Question Answer, Yelp Full, and Polarity. Furthermore, the proposed model has been tested on the Twitter US airlines non-benchmark dataset as well. The analysis indicates that using Fast Text as word embedding is a very promising approach.

Social media platforms and microblogging websites have gained accelerated popularity during the past few years. These platforms are used for expressing views and opinions about products, personalities, and events. Often during discussions and debates, fights take place on social media platforms which involves using rude, disrespectful, and hateful comments called toxic comments. The identification of toxic comments has been regarded as an essential element for social media platforms. This study introduces an ensemble approach, called regression vector voting classifier (RVVC), to identify the toxic comments on social media platforms. The ensemble merges the logistic regression and support vector classifier under soft voting criteria. Several experiments are performed on the imbalanced and balanced dataset to analyze the performance of the proposed approach. For data balance, the synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE) is used on the imbalanced dataset. Furthermore, two feature extraction approaches are utilized to investigate their suitability such as term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) and bag-of-words (BoW). The performance of the proposed approach is compared with several machine learning classifiers using accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. Results suggest that RVVC outperforms all other individual models when TF-IDF features are used with SMOTE balanced dataset and achieves an accuracy of 0.97.

The use of data from social networks such as Twitter has been increased during the last few years to improve political campaigns, quality of products and services, sentiment analysis, etc. Tweets classification based on user sentiments is a collaborative and important task for many organizations. This paper proposes a voting classifier (VC) to help sentiment analysis for such organizations. The VC is based on logistic regression (LR) and stochastic gradient descent classifier (SGDC) and uses a soft voting mechanism to make the final prediction. Tweets were classified into positive, negative and neutral classes based on the sentiments they contain. In addition, a variety of machine learning classifiers were evaluated using accuracy, precision, recall and F1 score as the performance metrics. The impact of feature extraction techniques, including term frequency (TF), term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF), and word2vec, on classification accuracy was investigated as well. Moreover, the performance of a deep long short-term memory (LSTM) network was analyzed on the selected dataset. The results show that the proposed VC performs better than that of other classifiers. The VC is able to achieve an accuracy of 0.789, and 0.791 with TF and TF-IDF feature extraction, respectively. The results demonstrate that ensemble classifiers achieve higher accuracy than non-ensemble classifiers. Experiments further proved that the performance of machine learning classifiers is better when TF-IDF is used as the feature extraction method. Word2vec feature extraction performs worse than TF and TF-IDF feature extraction. The LSTM achieves a lower accuracy than machine learning classifiers.