Text Analysis of COVID-19 Tweets

During the COVID-19 pandemic many countries were forced to implement lockdowns to prevent further spread of the SARS-CoV-2, prohibiting people from face-to-face social interactions. This unprecedented circumstance led to an increase in traffic on social media platforms, one of the most popular of which is Twitter, with a diverse spectrum of users from around the world. This quality, along with the ability to use its API for research purposes, makes it a valuable resource for data collection and analysis. In this paper we aim to present the sentiments towards the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines as it was imprinted through the users' tweets when the events were actually still in motion. For our research, we gathered the related data from Twitter and characterized the gathered tweets in two classes, positive and negative;using the BERT model, with an accuracy of 99%. Finally, we performed various time series analyses based on people's sentiment with reference to the pandemic period of 2021, the four major vaccine's companies as well as on the vaccine's technology.

Recent Dimensionality Reduction Techniques for High-Dimensional COVID-19 Data

We are going through the last years of the COVID-19 pandemic, where almost the entire research community has focused on the challenges that constantly arise. From the computational and mathematical perspective, we have to deal with a dataset with ultra-high volume and ultra-high dimensionality in several experimental studies. An indicative example is DNA sequencing technologies, which offer a more realistic picture of human diseases at the molecular biology level. However, these technologies produce data with high complexity and ultra-high dimensionality. On the other hand, dimensionality reduction techniques are the first choice to address this complexity, revealing the hidden data structure in the original multidimensional space. Also, such techniques can improve the efficiency of machine learning tasks such as classification and clustering. Towards this direction, we study the behavior of seven well-known and cutting-edge dimensionality reduction techniques tailored for RNA-sequencing data. Along with the study of the effect of these algorithms, we propose the extension of the Random projection and Geodesic distance t-Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (RGt-SNE) algorithm, a recent t-Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) improvement. We suggest a new distance criterion for the kernel matrix construction. Our results show the potential of the proposed algorithm and, at the same time, highlight the complexity of the COVID-19 data, which are not separable, creating a significant challenge that the Machine Learning field will have to face. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Text Analysis of COVID-19 Tweets

During the COVID-19 pandemic many countries were forced to implement lockdowns to prevent further spread of the SARS-CoV-2, prohibiting people from face-to-face social interactions. This unprecedented circumstance led to an increase in traffic on social media platforms, one of the most popular of which is Twitter, with a diverse spectrum of users from around the world. This quality, along with the ability to use its API for research purposes, makes it a valuable resource for data collection and analysis. In this paper we aim to present the sentiments towards the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines as it was imprinted through the users’ tweets when the events were actually still in motion. For our research, we gathered the related data from Twitter and characterized the gathered tweets in two classes, positive and negative;using the BERT model, with an accuracy of 99%. Finally, we performed various time series analyses based on people’s sentiment with reference to the pandemic period of 2021, the four major vaccine’s companies as well as on the vaccine’s technology. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.