Predicting Vaccine Hesitancy and Vaccine Sentiment Using Topic Modeling and Evolutionary Optimization

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has posed serious threats to the world population, affecting over 219 countries with a staggering impact of over 162 million cases and 3.36 million casualties. With the availability of multiple vaccines across the globe, framing vaccination policies for effectively inoculating a country’s population against such diseases is currently a crucial task for public health agencies. Social network users post their views and opinions on vaccines publicly and these posts can be put to good use in identifying vaccine hesitancy. In this paper, a vaccine hesitancy identification approach is proposed, built on novel text feature modeling based on evolutionary computation and topic modeling. The proposed approach was experimentally validated on two standard tweet datasets – the flu vaccine dataset and UK COVID-19 vaccine tweets. On the first dataset, the proposed approach outperformed the state-of-the-art in terms of standard metrics. The proposed model was also evaluated on the UKCOVID dataset and the results are presented in this paper, as our work is the first to benchmark a vaccine hesitancy model on this dataset.