DeepAI AI Chat
Log In Sign Up

Addressing machine learning concept drift reveals declining vaccine sentiment during the COVID-19 pandemic

12/03/2020
by   Martin Müller, et al.
EPFL
0

Social media analysis has become a common approach to assess public opinion on various topics, including those about health, in near real-time. The growing volume of social media posts has led to an increased usage of modern machine learning methods in natural language processing. While the rapid dynamics of social media can capture underlying trends quickly, it also poses a technical problem: algorithms trained on annotated data in the past may underperform when applied to contemporary data. This phenomenon, known as concept drift, can be particularly problematic when rapid shifts occur either in the topic of interest itself, or in the way the topic is discussed. Here, we explore the effect of machine learning concept drift by focussing on vaccine sentiments expressed on Twitter, a topic of central importance especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. We show that while vaccine sentiment has declined considerably during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, algorithms trained on pre-pandemic data would have largely missed this decline due to concept drift. Our results suggest that social media analysis systems must address concept drift in a continuous fashion in order to avoid the risk of systematic misclassification of data, which is particularly likely during a crisis when the underlying data can change suddenly and rapidly.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

07/05/2020

Detecting Topic and Sentiment Dynamics Due to COVID-19 Pandemic Using Social Media

The outbreak of the novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) has greatly inf...
02/13/2021

Pulse of the Pandemic: Iterative Topic Filtering for Clinical Information Extraction from Social Media

The rapid evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the need to...
04/21/2022

The Silent Problem – Machine Learning Model Failure – How to Diagnose and Fix Ailing Machine Learning Models

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed how healthcare is deliver...
07/10/2020

Reactive Soft Prototype Computing for Concept Drift Streams

The amount of real-time communication between agents in an information s...
11/30/2021

Sentiment Analysis and Effect of COVID-19 Pandemic using College SubReddit Data

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected societies and human health and well-b...
09/17/2019

Concept Drift Adaptive Physical Event Detection for Social Media Streams

Event detection has long been the domain of physical sensors operating i...