Automated Classification of Online Sources for Infectious Disease Occurrences Using Machine-Learning-Based Natural Language Processing Approaches

Collecting valid information from electronic sources to detect the potential outbreak of infectious disease is time-consuming and labor-intensive. The automated identification of relevant information using machine learning is necessary to respond to a potential disease outbreak. A total of 2864 documents were collected from various websites and subsequently manually categorized and labeled by two reviewers. Accurate labels for the training and test data were provided based on a reviewer consensus. Two machine learning algorithms—ConvNet and bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM)—and two classification methods—DocClass and SenClass—were used for classifying the documents. The precision, recall, F1, accuracy, and area under the curve were measured to evaluate the performance of each model. ConvNet yielded higher average, min, and max accuracies (87.6%, 85.2%, and 91.1%, respectively) than BiLSTM with DocClass, while BiLSTM performed better than ConvNet with SenClass with average, min, and max accuracies of 92.8%, 92.6%, and 93.3%, respectively. The performance of BiLSTM with SenClass yielded an overall accuracy of 92.9% in classifying infectious disease occurrences. Machine learning had a compatible performance with a human expert given a particular text extraction system. This study suggests that analyzing information from the website using machine learning can achieve significant accuracies in the presence of abundant articles/documents.