Comparative analysis of machine learning-based classification models using sentiment classification of tweets related to COVID-19 pandemic

• Main Authors: Gulati, Kamal, Saravana Kumar, S., Sarath Kumar Boddu, Raja, Sarvakar, Ketan, Kumar Sharma, Dilip, Nomani, M.Z.M.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Classification; COVID-19; Data mining; Epidemic; Machine learning; Sentiment analysis
• ISSN: 2214-7853; 2214-7853
• DOI: 10.1016/j.matpr.2021.04.364

Sentiment Analysis (SA) is the area of research to find useful information using the sentiments of people shared on social networking platforms like Twitter, Facebook, etc. Such kinds of analysis are useful to make classification of sentiments as positive, negative, or neutral. The process of classification of sentiments can be done with the help of a traditional lexicon-based approach or machine learning techniques-based approach. In this research paper, we are presenting a comparative analysis of popular machine learning-based classifiers. We have made experimentations using the tweet datasets related to the COVID-19 epidemic. We have used seven machine learning-based classifiers. These classifiers are applied to more than 72,000 tweets related to COVID-19. We have performed experimentations using three modes i.e. Unigram, Bigram, and Trigram. As per the results, Linear SVC, Perceptron, Passive Aggressive Classifier, and Logistic Regression able to achieve more than 98% maximum accuracy score in classification (unigram, bigram, trigram) and are very close to each other in terms of performance. The average accuracy achieved by Linear SVC, Perceptron, Passive Aggressive Classifier, and Logistic Regression are 0.981573613, 0.976506357, 0.981573613, and 0.976690621. Ada Boost Classifier performs worst among all other classifiers with 0.731435416 average accuracies. The details regarding data collection, experimentations, and results are presented in the research paper.