Vaccine Hesitancy Hotspots in Africa: An Insight From Geotagged Twitter Posts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many social media users express concerns about vaccines and their side effects on Twitter. These concerns lead to a compromise of confidence which brings about vaccine hesitancy. In Africa, vaccine hesitancy is a major challenge faced by health policymakers in the fight against COVID-19. Given that most tweets are geotagged, clustering them according to their sentiments could help identify locations that may likely experience vaccine hesitancy for health policy and planning. In this study, we collected 70 000 geotagged vaccine-related tweets in nine African countries, from December 2020 to February 2022. The tweets were classified into three sentiment classes—positive, negative, and neutral. The quality of the classification outputs was achieved using Naíve Bayes (NB), logistic regression (LR), support vector machines (SVMs), decision tree (DT), and K-nearest neighbor (KNN) machine learning classifiers. The LR achieved the highest accuracy of 71% with an average area under the curve of 85%. The point-based location technique was used to calculate the hotspots based on the locations of the classified tweets. Locations with green, red, and gray backgrounds on the map signify a hotspot for positive, negative, and neutral sentiments. The outcome of this research shows that discussions on social media can be analyzed to identify hotspots during a disease outbreak, which could inform health policy in planning and management of vaccine hesitancy in Africa.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".