Machine learning (ML) based forecasting mechanisms have proved their significance to anticipate in perioperative outcomes to improve the decision making on the future course of actions. The ML models have long been used in many application domains which needed the identification and prioritization of adverse factors for a threat. Several prediction methods are being popularly used to handle forecasting problems. This study demonstrates the capability of ML models to forecast the number of upcoming patients affected by COVID-19 which is presently considered as a potential threat to mankind. In particular, four standard forecasting models, such as linear regression (LR), least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO), support vector machine (SVM), and exponential smoothing (ES) have been used in this study to forecast the threatening factors of COVID-19. Three types of predictions are made by each of the models, such as the number of newly infected cases, the number of deaths, and the number of recoveries in the next 10 days. The results produced by the study proves it a promising mechanism to use these methods for the current scenario of the COVID-19 pandemic. The results prove that the ES performs best among all the used models followed by LR and LASSO which performs well in forecasting the new confirmed cases, death rate as well as recovery rate, while SVM performs poorly in all the prediction scenarios given the available dataset. INDEX TERMS COVID-19, exponential smoothing method, future forecasting, adjusted R 2 score, supervised machine learning.

The spread of Covid-19 has resulted in worldwide health concerns. Social media is increasingly used to share news and opinions about it. A realistic assessment of the situation is necessary to utilize resources optimally and appropriately. In this research, we perform Covid-19 tweets sentiment analysis using a supervised machine learning approach. Identification of Covid-19 sentiments from tweets would allow informed decisions for better handling the current pandemic situation. The used dataset is extracted from Twitter using IDs as provided by the IEEE data port. Tweets are extracted by an in-house built crawler that uses the Tweepy library. The dataset is cleaned using the preprocessing techniques and sentiments are extracted using the TextBlob library. The contribution of this work is the performance evaluation of various machine learning classifiers using our proposed feature set. This set is formed by concatenating the bag-of-words and the term frequency-inverse document frequency. Tweets are classified as positive, neutral, or negative. Performance of classifiers is evaluated on the accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score. For completeness, further investigation is made on the dataset using the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) architecture of the deep learning model. The results show that Extra Trees Classifiers outperform all other models by achieving a 0.93 accuracy score using our proposed concatenated features set. The LSTM achieves low accuracy as compared to machine learning classifiers. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed feature set, the results are compared with the Vader sentiment analysis technique based on the GloVe feature extraction approach.

The use of data from social networks such as Twitter has been increased during the last few years to improve political campaigns, quality of products and services, sentiment analysis, etc. Tweets classification based on user sentiments is a collaborative and important task for many organizations. This paper proposes a voting classifier (VC) to help sentiment analysis for such organizations. The VC is based on logistic regression (LR) and stochastic gradient descent classifier (SGDC) and uses a soft voting mechanism to make the final prediction. Tweets were classified into positive, negative and neutral classes based on the sentiments they contain. In addition, a variety of machine learning classifiers were evaluated using accuracy, precision, recall and F1 score as the performance metrics. The impact of feature extraction techniques, including term frequency (TF), term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF), and word2vec, on classification accuracy was investigated as well. Moreover, the performance of a deep long short-term memory (LSTM) network was analyzed on the selected dataset. The results show that the proposed VC performs better than that of other classifiers. The VC is able to achieve an accuracy of 0.789, and 0.791 with TF and TF-IDF feature extraction, respectively. The results demonstrate that ensemble classifiers achieve higher accuracy than non-ensemble classifiers. Experiments further proved that the performance of machine learning classifiers is better when TF-IDF is used as the feature extraction method. Word2vec feature extraction performs worse than TF and TF-IDF feature extraction. The LSTM achieves a lower accuracy than machine learning classifiers.

Amid the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, the closure of educational institutes leads to an unprecedented rise in online learning. For limiting the impact of COVID-19 and obstructing its widespread, educational institutions closed their campuses immediately and academic activities are moved to e-learning platforms. The effectiveness of e-learning is a critical concern for both students and parents, specifically in terms of its suitability to students and teachers and its technical feasibility with respect to different social scenarios. Such concerns must be reviewed from several aspects before e-learning can be adopted at such a larger scale. This study endeavors to investigate the effectiveness of e-learning by analyzing the sentiments of people about e-learning. Due to the rise of social media as an important mode of communication recently, people’s views can be found on platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc. This study uses a Twitter dataset containing 17,155 tweets about e-learning. Machine learning and deep learning approaches have shown their suitability, capability, and potential for image processing, object detection, and natural language processing tasks and text analysis is no exception. Machine learning approaches have been largely used both for annotation and text and sentiment analysis. Keeping in view the adequacy and efficacy of machine learning models, this study adopts TextBlob, VADER (Valence Aware Dictionary for Sentiment Reasoning), and SentiWordNet to analyze the polarity and subjectivity score of tweets’ text. Furthermore, bearing in mind the fact that machine learning models display high classification accuracy, various machine learning models have been used for sentiment classification. Two feature extraction techniques, TF-IDF (Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency) and BoW (Bag of Words) have been used to effectively build and evaluate the models. All the models have been evaluated in terms of various important performance metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score. The results reveal that the random forest and support vector machine classifier achieve the highest accuracy of 0.95 when used with Bow features. Performance comparison is carried out for results of TextBlob, VADER, and SentiWordNet, as well as classification results of machine learning models and deep learning models such as CNN (Convolutional Neural Network), LSTM (Long Short Term Memory), CNN-LSTM, and Bi-LSTM (Bidirectional-LSTM). Additionally, topic modeling is performed to find the problems associated with e-learning which indicates that uncertainty of campus opening date, children’s disabilities to grasp online education, and lagging efficient networks for online education are the top three problems.

Artificial intelligence (AI) techniques in general and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in particular have attained successful results in medical image analysis and classification. A deep CNN architecture has been proposed in this paper for the diagnosis of COVID-19 based on the chest X-ray image classification. Due to the nonavailability of sufficient-size and good-quality chest X-ray image dataset, an effective and accurate CNN classification was a challenge. To deal with these complexities such as the availability of a very-small-sized and imbalanced dataset with image-quality issues, the dataset has been preprocessed in different phases using different techniques to achieve an effective training dataset for the proposed CNN model to attain its best performance. The preprocessing stages of the datasets performed in this study include dataset balancing, medical experts’ image analysis, and data augmentation. The experimental results have shown the overall accuracy as high as 99.5% which demonstrates the good capability of the proposed CNN model in the current application domain. The CNN model has been tested in two scenarios. In the first scenario, the model has been tested using the 100 X-ray images of the original processed dataset which achieved an accuracy of 100%. In the second scenario, the model has been tested using an independent dataset of COVID-19 X-ray images. The performance in this test scenario was as high as 99.5%. To further prove that the proposed model outperforms other models, a comparative analysis has been done with some of the machine learning algorithms. The proposed model has outperformed all the models generally and specifically when the model testing was done using an independent testing set.