Analysis of COVID-19 vaccine adverse event using language model and unsupervised machine learning

BACKGROUND: After the COVID-19 pandemic, the world has made efforts to recover from the chaotic situation. Vaccination is a way to help control infectious diseases, and many people have been vaccinated against COVID-19 by this point. However, an extremely small number of those who received the vaccine have experienced diverse side effects. METHODS AND FINDINGS: In this study, we examined people who experienced adverse events with the COVID-19 vaccine by gender, age, vaccine manufacturer, and dose of vaccinations by using the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System datasets. Then we used a language model to vectorize symptom words and reduced their dimensionality. We also clustered symptoms by using unsupervised machine learning and analyzed the characteristics of each symptom cluster. Lastly, to discover any association rules among adverse events, we used a data mining approach. The frequency of adverse events was higher for women than men, for Moderna than for Pfizer or Janssen, and for the first dose than for the second dose. However, we found that characteristics of vaccine adverse events, including gender, vaccine manufacturer, age, and underlying diseases were different for each symptom cluster, and that fatal cases were significantly related to a particular cluster (associated with hypoxia). Also, as a result of the association analysis, the {chills ↔ pyrexia} and {vaccination site pruritus ↔ vaccination site erythema} rules had the highest support value of 0.087 and 0.046, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: We aim to contribute accurate information on the adverse events of the COVID-19 vaccine to relieve public anxiety due to unconfirmed statements about vaccines.