COVIDHealth: A Benchmark Twitter Dataset and Machine Learning based Web Application for Classifying COVID-19 Discussions (preprint)

The COVID-19 pandemic has had adverse effects on both physical and mental health. During this pandemic, numerous studies have focused on gaining insights into health-related perspectives from social media. In this study, our primary objective is to develop a machine learning-based web application for automatically classifying COVID-19-related discussions on social media. To achieve this, we label COVID-19-related Twitter data, provide benchmark classification results, and develop a web application. We collected data using the Twitter API and labeled a total of 6,667 tweets into five different classes: health risks, prevention, symptoms, transmission, and treatment. We extracted features using various feature extraction methods and applied them to seven different traditional machine learning algorithms, including Decision Tree, Random Forest, Stochastic Gradient Descent, Adaboost, K-Nearest Neighbour, Logistic Regression, and Linear SVC. Additionally, we used four deep learning algorithms: LSTM, CNN, RNN, and BERT, for classification. Overall, we achieved a maximum F1 score of 90.43% with the CNN algorithm in deep learning. The Linear SVC algorithm exhibited the highest F1 score at 86.13%, surpassing other traditional machine learning approaches. Our study not only contributes to the field of health-related data analysis but also provides a valuable resource in the form of a web-based tool for efficient data classification, which can aid in addressing public health challenges and increasing awareness during pandemics. We made the dataset and application publicly available, which can be downloaded from this link https://github.com/Bishal16/COVID19-Health-Related-Data-Classification-Website.

COVIDFakeExplainer: An Explainable Machine Learning based Web Application for Detecting COVID-19 Fake News (preprint)

Fake news has emerged as a critical global issue, magnified by the COVID-19 pandemic, underscoring the need for effective preventive tools. Leveraging machine learning, including deep learning techniques, offers promise in combatting fake news. This paper goes beyond by establishing BERT as the superior model for fake news detection and demonstrates its utility as a tool to empower the general populace. We have implemented a browser extension, enhanced with explainability features, enabling real-time identification of fake news and delivering easily interpretable explanations. To achieve this, we have employed two publicly available datasets and created seven distinct data configurations to evaluate three prominent machine learning architectures. Our comprehensive experiments affirm BERT's exceptional accuracy in detecting COVID-19-related fake news. Furthermore, we have integrated an explainability component into the BERT model and deployed it as a service through Amazon's cloud API hosting (AWS). We have developed a browser extension that interfaces with the API, allowing users to select and transmit data from web pages, receiving an intelligible classification in return. This paper presents a practical end-to-end solution, highlighting the feasibility of constructing a holistic system for fake news detection, which can significantly benefit society.

A Survey of COVID-19 Misinformation: Datasets, Detection Techniques and Open Issues (preprint)

Misinformation during pandemic situations like COVID-19 is growing rapidly on social media and other platforms. This expeditious growth of misinformation creates adverse effects on the people living in the society. Researchers are trying their best to mitigate this problem using different approaches based on Machine Learning (ML), Deep Learning (DL), and Natural Language Processing (NLP). This survey aims to study different approaches of misinformation detection on COVID-19 in recent literature to help the researchers in this domain. More specifically, we review the different methods used for COVID-19 misinformation detection in their research with an overview of data pre-processing and feature extraction methods to get a better understanding of their work. We also summarize the existing datasets which can be used for further research. Finally, we discuss the limitations of the existing methods and highlight some potential future research directions along this dimension to combat the spreading of misinformation during a pandemic.

An Ensemble-based Multi-Criteria Decision Making Method for COVID-19 Cough Classification (preprint)

The objectives of this research are analysing the performance of the state-of-the-art machine learning techniques for classifying COVID-19 from cough sound and identifying the model(s) that consistently perform well across different cough datasets. Different performance evaluation metrics (such as precision, sensitivity, specificity, AUC, accuracy, etc.) make it difficult to select the best performance model. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose an ensemble-based multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) method for selecting top performance machine learning technique(s) for COVID-19 cough classification. We use four cough datasets, namely Cambridge, Coswara, Virufy, and NoCoCoDa to verify the proposed method. At first, our proposed method uses the audio features of cough samples and then applies machine learning (ML) techniques to classify them as COVID-19 or non-COVID-19. Then, we consider a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method that combines ensemble technologies (i.e., soft and hard) to select the best model. In MCDM, we use the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) for ranking purposes, while entropy is applied to calculate evaluation criteria weights. In addition, we apply the feature reduction process through recursive feature elimination with cross-validation under different estimators. The results of our empirical evaluations show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art models.

A Survey of Machine Learning Techniques for Detecting and Diagnosing COVID-19 from Imaging (preprint)

Due to the limited availability and high cost of the reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test, many studies have proposed machine learning techniques for detecting COVID-19 from medical imaging. The purpose of this study is to systematically review, assess, and synthesize research articles that have used different machine learning techniques to detect and diagnose COVID-19 from chest X-ray and CT scan images. A structured literature search was conducted in the relevant bibliographic databases to ensure that the survey solely centered on reproducible and high-quality research. We selected papers based on our inclusion criteria. In this survey, we reviewed $98$ articles that fulfilled our inclusion criteria. We have surveyed a complete pipeline of chest imaging analysis techniques related to COVID-19, including data collection, pre-processing, feature extraction, classification, and visualization. We have considered CT scans and X-rays as both are widely used to describe the latest developments in medical imaging to detect COVID-19. This survey provides researchers with valuable insights into different machine learning techniques and their performance in the detection and diagnosis of COVID-19 from chest imaging. At the end, the challenges and limitations in detecting COVID-19 using machine learning techniques and the future direction of research are discussed.

ECOVNet: An Ensemble of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks Based on EfficientNet to Detect COVID-19 From Chest X-rays (preprint)

This paper proposed an ensemble of deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) based on EfficientNet, named ECOVNet, to detect COVID-19 using a large chest X-ray data set. At first, the open-access large chest X-ray collection is augmented, and then ImageNet pre-trained weights for EfficientNet is transferred with some customized fine-tuning top layers that are trained, followed by an ensemble of model snapshots to classify chest X-rays corresponding to COVID-19, normal, and pneumonia. The predictions of the model snapshots, which are created during a single training, are combined through two ensemble strategies, i.e., hard ensemble and soft ensemble to ameliorate classification performance and generalization in the related task of classifying chest X-rays.

PDCOVIDNet: A Parallel-Dilated Convolutional Neural Network Architecture for Detecting COVID-19 from Chest X-Ray Images (preprint)

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to severely undermine the prosperity of the global health system. To combat this pandemic, effective screening techniques for infected patients are indispensable. There is no doubt that the use of chest X-ray images for radiological assessment is one of the essential screening techniques. Some of the early studies revealed that the patient's chest X-ray images showed abnormalities, which is natural for patients infected with COVID-19. In this paper, we proposed a parallel-dilated convolutional neural network (CNN) based COVID-19 detection system from chest x-ray images, named as Parallel-Dilated COVIDNet (PDCOVIDNet). First, the publicly available chest X-ray collection fully preloaded and enhanced, and then classified by the proposed method. Differing convolution dilation rate in a parallel form demonstrates the proof-of-principle for using PDCOVIDNet to extract radiological features for COVID-19 detection. Accordingly, we have assisted our method with two visualization methods, which are specifically designed to increase understanding of the key components associated with COVID-19 infection. Both visualization methods compute gradients for a given image category related to feature maps of the last convolutional layer to create a class-discriminative region. In our experiment, we used a total of 2,905 chest X-ray images, comprising three cases (such as COVID-19, normal, and viral pneumonia), and empirical evaluations revealed that the proposed method extracted more significant features expeditiously related to the suspected disease. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method significantly improves performance metrics: accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 scores reach 96.58%, 96.58%, 96.59%, and 96.58%, respectively, which is comparable or enhanced compared with the state-of-the-art methods.