A lexicon-based method for detecting eye diseases on microblogs

Abstract

This paper explored the feasibility of detecting eye diseases on microblogs. A lexicon-based approach was developed to provide an early recognition of common eye disease from social media platforms. The data were obtained using Twitter free streaming Application Programming Interface (API). A cluster analysis was applied to extract instances that share similar characteristics. We extracted three types of emotions (positive, negative, and neutral) from users’ messages (tweets) using SentiStrength. A time-series method was used to determine the applicability of predicting emotional changes over a period of seven months. The relevant disease symptoms were extracted using Apriori algorithm with prediction accuracy of 98.89%. This study offers a timely and effective method that can be implemented to help healthcare decision makers and researchers reduce the spread of eye diseases in a population specific manner.