The recent large outbreak of infectious diseases, such as influenza-like illnesses and COVID-19, has resulted in a flood of health-related posts on the Internet in general and on social media in particular, in a wide range of languages and dialects around the world. The obvious relationship between the number of infectious disease cases and the number of social media posts prompted us to consider how we can leverage such health-related content to detect the emergence of diseases, particularly influenza-like illnesses, and foster disease surveillance systems. We used Algerian Arabic posts as a case study in our research. From data collection to content classification, a complete workflow was implemented. The main contributions of this work are the creation of a large corpus of Arabic Facebook posts based on Algerian dialect and the proposal of a new classification model based on sentiment analysis and one-dimensional convolutional neural networks. The proposed model categorizes Facebook posts based on the users’ feelings. To counteract data imbalance, two techniques have been considered, namely, SMOTE and random oversampling (ROS). Using a 5-fold cross-validation, the proposed model outperformed other baseline and state-of-the-art models such as SVM, LSTM, GRU, and BiLTSM in terms of several performance metrics.
Feature selection is a key issue in machine learning and data mining. A great deal of effort has been devoted to static feature selection. However, with the assumption that features occur over time, methods developed so far are difficult to use if not applicable. Therefore, there is a need to design new methods to deal with streaming feature selection (SFS). In this paper, we propose the use of dynamic optimization to handle the dynamic nature of SFS with the ultimate goal to improve the quality of the evolving subset of selected features. A hybrid model is developed to fish out relevant features set as unnecessary by an online feature selection process. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed framework compared to some state of the art methods.
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