Sentiment and Mobility Analysis on COVID-19 Restrictions with Autoencoder
Weldy Sujarmanto, Merpati Vortuna Amerta Nalle, Nurul Maulida, Bayu Chandra Putra, Stevania Bere, Novanto Yudistira · 2022
In 2020, the world was attacked by a virus known as the COVID-19 virus. Restrictions on people’s activities were conducted in various countries to prevent the spread of the virus. However, since people were vaccinated, restriction levels have been reduced or eliminated, although the new cases of COVID-19 worldwide have not ended. People’s responses to restriction policies vary, including sentiment and human mobility. The possibility of sentiment is either support or resistance, while mobility is staying at home or not. This study analyzes the proportion between the two responses through two types of data: text for sentiment and time series for mobility. Sentiment text data is taken from Twitter and mobility time series data is taken from Google Mobility for February 2020 to April 2022. Twitter and Google Mobility data are collected from several countries using English and implementing restrictions: Australia, Canada, Singapore, the United Kingdom (UK), and the United States (US). The unsupervised Autoencoder model is leveraged to find clusters. Two Autoencoder architectures are proposed for each data type. Before being used in Multilayer Autoencoder, text data is converted to vector data by Word2Vec. On the other hand, LSTM-Autoencoder is used for time series data. Finally, hypothesis tests are performed to determine the mean between the clusters formed is the same or different, out of five countries, only Canada has a null hypothesis is accepted, that means people in Canada tend to be neutral in response to COVID-19 while mobilities are dynamics, it reveals that people in Canada obey the government’s decision on restrictions during the rise of COVID-19 cases.