Comparison of Machine Learning for Sentiment Analysis in Detecting Anxiety Based on Social Media Data

TL;DR

This study compares various machine learning methods for detecting anxiety from social media comments related to government pandemic responses, finding Random Forest most accurate with around 85% accuracy.

Contribution

It evaluates multiple machine learning algorithms and feature extraction techniques for sentiment-based anxiety detection in social media comments during COVID-19.

Findings

Random Forest achieved the highest accuracy (~85%)

K-NN had the best precision in detection

XG-Boost demonstrated the best recall

Abstract

All groups of people felt the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. This situation triggers anxiety, which is bad for everyone. The government's role is very influential in solving these problems with its work program. It also has many pros and cons that cause public anxiety. For that, it is necessary to detect anxiety to improve government programs that can increase public expectations. This study applies machine learning to detecting anxiety based on social media comments regarding government programs to deal with this pandemic. This concept will adopt a sentiment analysis in detecting anxiety based on positive and negative comments from netizens. The machine learning methods implemented include K-NN, Bernoulli, Decision Tree Classifier, Support Vector Classifier, Random Forest, and XG-boost. The data sample used is the result of crawling YouTube comments. The data used amounted to 4862 comments consisting of negative and positive data with 3211 and 1651. Negative data identify anxiety, while positive data identifies hope (not anxious). Machine learning is processed based on feature extraction of count-vectorization and TF-IDF. The results showed that the sentiment data amounted to 3889 and 973 in testing, and training with the greatest accuracy was the random forest with feature extraction of vectorization count and TF-IDF of 84.99% and 82.63%, respectively. The best precision test is K-NN, while the best recall is XG-Boost. Thus, Random Forest is the best accurate to detect someone's anxiety based-on data from social media.