Mood detection and prediction using conventional machine learning techniques on COVID19 data

Emotion detection is a promising field of research in multiple perspectives such as psychology, marketing, network analysis and so on. Multiple models have been suggested over the years for accurate and efficient mood detection. Identifying emotion, or mood, from text has progressed from a simple frequency distribution analysis to far more complicated learning approaches. The main aim of all these text mining and analysis is twofold. First is to categorise existing text into broad classes of emotions, such as happy, sad, angry, surprised and so on. The second aim is to accurately predict the moods of real-time streaming text. The novelty of the work lies in the extensive comparison of nine conventional learning methods with respect to performance metrics precision, recall, F1 and accuracy as well as studying the variance of mood over time using a wide array of moods (25). Using conventional classifiers allow near real-time predictions, can work on considerably less training data, and has the flexibility of feature engineering, as deep learning methods have feature engineering embedded in the model. Since a single line of text can be associated with multiple emotions, this article compares the performance of classifiers in predicting multiple moods for streaming text with likelihood-based ranking. An android application named Citizens’ Sense was developed for text collection and analysis. The performance of mood classifiers are tested further using Twitter data related to COVID19. Based on the precision, recall, F1 and accuracy of the classifiers, it can be seen that Random Forest, Decision Tree and Complement Naive Bayes classifiers are marginally better than the other classifiers. The variance of mood over time, and predicted moods for text support this finding.