Sustainable Cities and Society 71 (2021) 102993

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Sustainable Cities and Society

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/scs

SNS Big Data Analysis Framework for COVID-19 Outbreak Prediction in

Smart Healthy City
Abir EL Azzaoui, Sushil Kumar Singh, Jong Hyuk Park *
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Seoul National University of Science and Technology, (SeoulTech), Seoul 01811, Republic of Korea

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Nowadays, the world is experiencing a pandemic crisis due to the spread of COVID-19, a novel coronavirus
COVID-19 disease. The contamination rate and death cases are expeditiously increasing. Simultaneously, people are no
Smart Healthy City longer relying on traditional news channels to enlighten themselves about the epidemic situation. Alternately,
Big Data Analysis
smart cities citizens are relying more on Social Network Service (SNS) to follow the latest news and information
SNS
NLP
regarding the outbreak, share their opinions, and express their feelings and symptoms. In this paper, we propose
an SNS Big Data Analysis Framework for COVID-19 Outbreak Prediction in Smart Sustainable Healthy City,
where Twitter platform is adopted. Over 10000 Tweets were collected during two months, 38% of users aged
between 18 and 29, while 26% are between 30 and 49 years old. 56% of them are males and 44% are females.
The geospatial location is USA, and the used language is English. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is deployed
to filter the tweets. Results demonstrated an outbreak cluster predicted seven days earlier than the confirmed
cases with an indicator of 0.989. Analyzing data from SNS platforms enabled predicting future outbreaks several
days earlier, and scientifically reduce the infection rate in a smart sustainable healthy city environment.

1. Introduction
By the end of 2019, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission in
China declared accumulated cases of patients with pneumonia symp­
toms [1]. A few days later, the World Health Organization (WHO)
recorded the first virus outbreak. This flagship technical report named
the novel virus COVID-19 (Corona Virus Disease 2019). Since then,
global media and healthcare organizations have raced to publish and
deliver information and guidance to the public. On January 13, 2020,
Thailand officially confirmed one COVID-19 case, the first contamina­
tion outside China. Other countries were infected as well such as South
Korea and Japan. On March 11, 2020, WHO declared a COVID-19
pandemic, calling for a public quarantine, raising the virus counter­
measures to the highest levels, and shutting down several international
airports to control the outbreak considering the alarming levels of
spread and severity.
With the continuous spread of the virus across the globe, the concept
of Smart Healthy Cities becomes under the scoop. A Smart Sustainable
City (SSC) is the approach of allotting the progress of Information and
Communication Technology (ICT) and other innovative means to serve
and improve the Quality of Life (QoL) of its citizens [2], all while
assuring the availability of the services for current and future genera­
tion. Enhancing the QoL is only possible with advanced transportation,
governance, finance, education, and health services. Under the same
conditions, the United for Smart Sustainable Cities (U4SSC) initiative
[3] reported the healthcare system as one of the crucial and main Key
Performance Indicators (KPI) for a successful SSC. The noticeable
progress of healthcare services and technologies, named Smart Health­
care, have a direct contribution with the improvement of smart cities in
general. The better the service provided by smart healthcare are, the
more competently the life is in a smart city. Respectively, the smart
sustainable cities are developed into Sustainable Smart Healthy Cities
(SSHC). Researchers and SSHC’s citizens were looking forward to the
measures will be taking to cope with the sudden virus outbreak and how
it will affect the sustainability and development of their smart cities.
Singapore, as an example of SSHC deployed state-led technologies such
as TraceTogether application and SafeEntry system for digital surveil­
lance during the outbreak of the virus [4], which seemingly contributed
to controlling the fast propagation of the virus. Notwithstanding, the
COVID-19 epidemic have affected some characteristics of SSHC and
identified some of its weaknesses [5]. Due to the large population of
SSHC, the human proximity narrowed down the social distancing

* Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: abir.el@seoultech.ac.kr (A. EL Azzaoui), sushil.sngh001007@seoultech.ac.kr (S.K. Singh), jhpark1@seoultech.ac.kr (J.H. Park).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2021.102993
Received 26 November 2020; Received in revised form 8 March 2021; Accepted 2 May 2021
Available online 7 May 2021
2210-6707/© 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
A. EL Azzaoui et al.
measures. Moreover, SSHC also faced the problem of micro-mobility
spaces [6–8]; in order to reduce the infection rate and to keep up with
the sustainability demand, smart cities need to provide more spaces for
walking and diminish the public transportation usage.
Antithetically, following the advancement of smart cities in the area
of 5 G networks, people are more connected via their smart devices
including smartphones, tablets, computers, smart TVs and so on. The
study in [9] disclosed that the average time spent on the smartphone by
an adult is 232 minutes per day. Similarly, 90% of adolescents in Nor­
way were found to use SNS platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and
Instagram daily [10]. People are exposed to billions of information and
news regarding their interests, making SNS platforms the main source of
news particularly during a pandemic situation due to social distancing
measures and quarantine [11]. Multiple Social Networking Services
reported an increase in usage. As one of the most used social media
platforms, Facebook has reported a 50% increase in overall messaging
when WHO announced the pandemic status [12]. WhatsApp, too, has
disclosed a 40% increase in the same period. As a general overview of
the statistics, usage of social media has increased by more than 9%
during the COVID-19 pandemic [13]; this consists of 321 million new
users, with the worldwide total at 3.80 billion users. People are no
longer relying on classic media sources such as government news or
local healthcare providers to inform themselves during a pandemic sit­
uation such as the current COVID-19. Instead, they tend to trust social
media platforms and messenger services more, where they can express
their opinion and enlighten themselves about the current status
momentarily. For instance, online headlines and hashtags during the
month of January mostly deal with fear and prejudice against the Chi­
nese people [14].
Online platforms were the main source of information as people
usually do not watch television news or read the newspapers, leading to
a COVID-19 infodemic situation. The term infodemic was defined by
Zarocostats et al. [15] as the high demand for timely, trustworthy in­
formation about a novel virus. Fig. 1 presents the graphical chart of the
number of mentions of the hashtag (a type of metadata tag used on social
networks) “#coronavirus” on the Twitter platform from January (the
beginning of the outbreak) until March (the peak of the outbreak). We
noticed that the searching rate using the keyword “coronavirus” was
even higher than the number of hashtags mentions. This means that
Twitter users were actively reading the news and viewing content
regarding COVID-19 to keep themselves informed.
SNS platforms such as Twitter contain valuable data and informa­
tion. Users, for instance, may disclose their symptoms online and request
advice from other users. They may as well mention their locations,
Fig. 1. Coronavirus hashtag’s report on Twitter.
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Sustainable Cities and Society 71 (2021) 102993
sharing various types of recent information and news regarding the virus
outbreak. SNS users produce extensive spatial and temporal data. These
data are the main pillar for infodemiology scientists. The term info­
demiology refers to the novel science portfolio of information science
and epidemiology to address the pressing concerns for public health and
policy decisions [16–18]. With an increasing number of people turning
to social media for information and to express their sentiments, fears,
and opinions during this epidemic [19], SNS platforms function as a
convenient source of information [43], yet only a few systematic studies
have been conducted using data generated by social media.
A smart and fully sustainable healthy city commits to utilize ICT and
alike technologies in order to improve the QoL of its citizens and
enhance its services while maintaining the required sustainability. Thus,
predicting future clusters of the virus outbreak and preventing fake news
from further propagation are critical actions to reduce the burdens faced
by SSHC. To this end, and to exploit the openly shared SNS data, we
propose an SNS big data analysis framework related to COVID-19 using
Twitter API as a platform, Python, and NLP methods to predict potential
future cases and virus outbreak hotspots based on the users’ openly
shared data including location and symptoms. SNS users provide regular
updates about their health status and concerns regarding the virus,
including their locations such as home, work, or school, and frequently
visited places. Moreover, we analyze the shared information on SNS to
detect false information and suppress its spread as it is considered one of
the main and direct reasons the virus transmission increases. Fake news
is covering official healthcare providers’ voices and government ad­
visers on COVID-19, making it extremely difficult to deliver the right
instructions [20]. Researchers from the University of East Anglia
modeled the effect of fake news and misinformation on the propagation
of infectious diseases, and results showed that reducing misleading
advice and misinformation by just 10% noticeably reduced people’s
risky behaviors that directly cause the virus spread. Other misleading
information such as news of fake lockdowns directly contributes to
public panic. We have witnessed several cases around the world where
people were rushing to buy food supplies following fake news of lock­
down, breaking social distancing rules and leading to further virus
propagation [45].
Very limited researches have been conducted on SNS data for
COVID-19 alike crisis. Besides, existing researches’ focus point is either
sentimental analysis, fake news detection, or virus outbreak prediction.
However, via this proposed study, we strongly believe that big data
analysis of SNS information is crucial and critical application for SSHC
during the time of epidemic to control the situation, manage the circu­
lated and shared information, prevent misinformation from spreading
A. EL Azzaoui et al.
further, and predict mainly future potential outbreak locations, hot­
spots, and patients.
The following are the main contributions of our study:
• We proposed an SNS big data analysis framework based on users’
openly shared information wherein we analyze the keywords and
sentences related to COVID-19 tweeted and openly by the users
relying on public accounts. This investigation stimulated and
improved government and healthcare providers’ perception of peo­
ple’s opinions as well as the tendency to stick to social distancing and
follow the rules given by the World Health Organization.
• Predicting COVID-19 outbreak and detecting future potential pa­
tient’s clusters by analyzing the tweets based on the keywords
database: These keywords include basic COVID-19 symptoms such as
dry cough and high body temperature. SNS users tend to share their
symptoms as well as those of their companions to get advice from
other users or simply to express themselves. We accumulated a
database for two months containing public tweets, to predict the
whereabouts of a possible outbreak.
• Detecting fake news and managing infodemic by comparing the
tweets to fact-checking websites to detect the circulated fake news
and calculate the propagation’s coefficient: Fake news contributes
directly to the virus spread. Thus, we believe that infodemic man­
agement is mandatory to control the epidemic in SSHC.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: in the second section,
we present a summary of other existing studies; Section 3 presents our
proposed framework overview and explains in detail our flow diagram;
the fourth section contains the numerical results and analysis based on
the Twitter case study; finally, we conclude this work in the fifth section.
2. Related works
The recent advancement of smart cities and 5 G technologies con­
tributes directly to the increase of SNS and mobile users. Since the
Quality of Experience guaranteed by the 5 G network is relatively high,
users in the SSHC rely more and more on their phones to be informed
daily instead of classic news channels. Taking the Twitter platform as an
example, Monthly Active Users (MAU) in Japan numbered over 21
million, and they communicate and share information via Twitter [21].
An average of 6000 tweets per second was recorded in May 2020, and
200 billion tweets per year [22]. People rely more on SNS platforms to
inform themselves about the pandemic. Nonetheless, very few studies
considered investigating and analyzing the news and information
broadcast on social media to understand the propagation of the virus. In
this section, we discuss some of the works that have explored social
networks to derive the outbreak patterns and people’s willingness to
contribute to the virus control [23].
2.1. Seminal contribution
To the best of our knowledge, only five studies have considered
analyzing social network data and news to understand the propagation
of misinformation and its correlation with the virus outbreak. For
instance, Yoo et al. [24] investigated the effects of SNS communication
during an epidemic period such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome
(MERS) and argued that it can predict preventive behavioral intentions
in South Korea. The authors examined the theoretical expression and
reception effect model using data collected from a nationally represen­
tative panel survey. Results showed that public health organizations
need to adapt SNS monitoring tools to a better understanding of diverse
social groups’ opinions and requests in order to adjust their messages
based on it. This research certainly proposed the management of SNS
platforms such as Twitter for outbreak cluster control, however, the
authors didn’t consider the propagation of fake news. Moreover, the
proposed method cannot make casual inferences regarding the
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Sustainable Cities and Society 71 (2021) 102993
relationship among key variables. Shahi et al. [25] presented a multi­
lingual cross-domain dataset of 5182 fact-checked news articles for
COVID-19. Their proposal included a classifier for fake news automatic
detection. The authors collected articles and news related to COVID-19
from two sources - “Poynter” and “Snopes” - and performed explanatory
analysis on it. They have a well-covered article that is linked to social
media accounts including Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, and
Instagram. The proposed machine learning classifier recorded an F1-
score of 0.76. This result helps in the initial screening of propagation of
fake news and misinformation during the pandemic period, nonetheless,
this work didn’t provide a method for Twitter infodemic managing and
considered human annotation categories only for tree languages.
Following the same concept of detecting fake news on social media,
and in order to gain early insight into the social opinion during a global
pandemic, Shahi et al. [26] conducted an exploratory study on the
propagation and authors of misinformation on Twitter. They divided the
false claims they found into two categories - false news and partially
false news - and found that verified accounts including celebrities and
organizations are involved as well in creating or spreading misinfor­
mation by retweeting them. The results of this mapping study showed
the huge gap in the current scientific coverage of the topic, covered the
most shared fake news, yet the used dataset excluded the less viral
misinformation. Similarly, Massaad et al. [27] designed social media
data analytics in order to describe and analyze the volume, content, and
geospatial distribution of tweets associated with telehealth during the
COVID-19 pandemic. They have inquired about Twitter public data to
access tweets and analyze them using Natural Language Processing
(NLP) and unsupervised learning methods. The study was conducted in
one country, results showed that such platform must be used to evaluate
the needs of societies and to embrace the healthcare response during a
pandemic. Yet, fake news was not taking under consideration and the
data based used for analyzing the results included all the information
form Twitter. Likewise, Pui et al. [28] discussed how the content of
tweets about COVID-19 can help understand the virus outbreak based on
sentimental analysis, however, this work lacks results development.
While Jia et al. [29] emphasized on the usefulness of the geographic
information system to fight this epidemic. The authors discussed in their
paper how the national intelligent syndromic surveillance system could
identify early risk by detecting patient’s symptoms and locations.
Other researchers focused on the big data analysis of social media for
various motivations but did not deal with the COVID-19 topic. None­
theless, we included their works in the related work section as they
helped build the main pillar of data collection and analysis on social
media platforms. Analogously, Htet et al. [30] conducted social media
data analysis using a maximum entropy classifier on the big data pro­
cessing framework. They considered Twitter as the platform and
retrieved the health condition, education status, and states of business
using data mining techniques, and a maximum entropy classifier was
used to perform sentiment analysis on their tweets, yet the Hadoop MR
method used has some drawbacks in the case of the transaction between
input and output. Following the same concept, Barbosa et al. [31] pre­
sented a robust sentiment detection method using Twitter as a platform
from Biased and noisy data. The authors leveraged sources of noisy la­
bels as training data. The results obtained showed lower error rates as an
effective polarity classifier was produced even when only a small
number of data were provided, nonetheless, sentences with antagonistic
sentiments cannot be analyzed.
2.2. Key consideration for COVID-19 prediction model
In this section, we discuss similar contributions and related work,
compare related research studies (Table 1), and present our main key
consideration for our proposed SNS-based COVID-19 outbreak predic­
tion in a smart healthy city. Based on the abovementioned related works,
we could say that authors focused more on fake news detection and
public sentiment determination. In our approach, however, we tried to
A. EL Azzaoui et al. Sustainable Cities and Society 71 (2021) 102993

Table 1
Related work comparison
Research work Year Twitter Other Method/ SNS Sentiment Fake News Limitations
Platform Software/ Monitoring Detection Detection
Hardware

Yoo et al. [24] 2016 Yes No Structural Yes No No Cannot make causal inferences regarding the
equation relationship among the key variable.
modeling.
MPlus V6.1
Shahi et al. [25] 2020 Yes No NLP, No No Yes Human annotated categories only for tree
Python. languages.
Shahi et al. [26] 2020 Yes No Python No No Yes The dataset excludes less viral misinformation.
Massaad et al. 2020 Yes No Google Colab. No Yes No The data collected only in one country.
[27] Python.
Pui et al. [28] 2020 Yes No Google Colab No Yes No The results were not developed
Python
Htet et al. [30] 2018 Yes No HBase. No Yes No Hadoop MR used has some drawbacks in the
Raspberry pi case of the transaction between input and
output.
Barbosa et 2010 Yes No Support vector No Yes No Sentences with antagonistic sentiments cannot
al. [31] machines be analyzed
Our 2020 Yes No Google Colab Yes Yes Yes Tested only one SNS platform
Contribution Python

detect and predict future outbreak hotspots based on openly public
published posts on Twitter. In our approach, we considered sentiment
detection, understanding of people’s fear, and fake news detection as
well as two other considerations. Our main key consideration can be
described as follows:
platform to track, understand, and predict future virus outbreaks as well
as manage the infodemic and prevent fake news from spreading. This
framework includes four layers: 1) User Layer, 2) Fog Layer, 3) Cloud
Layer, and 4) Application Layer. The overview of the framework is
depicted in Fig. 2 below.

• Sustainability: In a SSHC environment, authorities can make use of
the available connectivity and data online to control the outbreak of
any infectious disease such as COVID-19. Users of SNS tend to share
valuable data and information online; such data, when correctly
filtered and analyzed aid in better understanding of the virus prop­
agation patterns and help contain it. We focused on using this
approach to proposing a sustainable way to predict the virus
outbreak for the authorities to make accurate and meaningful de­
cisions. Detecting the virus outbreak cluster will directly impact the
management of the pandemic in SSHC, thus, maintaining the
required level of QoL while improving the health care service.
• Security and privacy: Other approaches do not consider the data
security and the privacy of users as they are using the raw data
provided by the SNS platforms’ API without filtering it. In order to
maintain data protection agreement in different regions, our pro­
posed approach analyze only the openly shared data by users on
Twitter. Moreover, we consider in this study the privacy of users by
adding a filter functionality using NLP methods before forwarding
the data to be processed; in the filter phase, we omit the user name
and SNS identification. This step allowed us to analyze the data
anonymously and retrieve knowledge without violating the users’
privacy.
• Availability: This approach is based on the data collected from
openly shared tweets on Twitter. Using the API provided by Twitter,
we can generate and collect data from various users in multiple lo­
cations and from diverse backgrounds, which generates a large
database of information.
• Integrity: Data integrity refers to the assurance and maintenance of
accuracy of data over its life cycle [46–47]. In this approach, we
filtered the data thoughtfully before proceeding to the analysis
phase, which guarantees accurate and meticulous data for our pre­
diction model.
3. Proposed SNS big data analysis framework
Very few infodemiology studies have applied network analyses as a
method of pandemic management. To this end, we proposed a Big Data
analysis framework based on information shared openly on the SNS
3.1. General overview
The proposed framework contains mainly four layers, and it is
designed to analyze data from SNS platforms based on the information
shared by the users:
User layer: The first layer of our proposed framework is the user’s
layer. SNS users in this layer use their smartphones, computers, and/or
tablets to surf the platforms. Users can consume data - which means
being a mere receiver of information - participate in the creation of new
data, and/or share existing data. Each user utilizes one or multiple SNS
platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and so on to:
• Receive information regarding the virus: Users utilize the platform to
receive, search, and read news and information regarding COVID-19.
The data could reach the user in the form of posts, messages, videos,
and news articles shared by other users. Users are capable of
searching on SNS platforms using keywords or hashtags to retrieve
their desired information. Taking Twitter as an example, in 2019, the
platform recorded 330 million monthly active users, 40% of whom
use the service daily. Note, however, that Twitter announced that
over 500 million people access its platform without logging into an
account [32]. These numbers suggest that people are using Twitter as
receivers, and that they are capable of getting the information they
need without participating.
• Share information regarding the virus: Users can share any post or
article they want on their profile. This action requires having an
active account and helps in understanding the user’s opinion later in
the analysis phase.
• Create content and information regarding the virus: SNS platforms give
users the power to express themselves and their thoughts virtually.
Users contribute to creating new information and data directly by
posting their viewpoints, sharing their knowledge and experiences,
and expressing their feelings regarding the epidemic situation. Such
data, after being analyzed, strengthen our understanding of how
people react through a serious pandemic, including their willingness
to stick to the authority’s instruction in order to control the virus
outbreak. Moreover, checking if the shared information contains any

4
A. EL Azzaoui et al.
Fig. 2. SNS Big Data Analysis Framework Overview.
misleading information is a critical point before people start to
reshare and believe it.
• Update their health status and concerns: SNS users tend to share their
concerns about their health status and conditions online. The authors
in [42] surveyed 1,040 US adults and found that roughly 33% are
using SNS platforms such as Twitter to share medical questions,
obtain health information, and track their symptoms. 80% of par­
ticipants aged 18 ~ 24 said that they are more likely to share in­
formation about their health condition and symptoms on social
media. Analyzing these data can help healthcare providers and au­
thorities predict potential future COVID-19 outbreak hotspots and
make fast decisions to stop it from spreading further. We will explain
in the next section how this functionality is crucial for virus control.
• Share their locations and visited places: Another valuable information
that users tend to share in their SNS accounts is their location. When
they post a picture or a text post, they are most likely to mention the
place where they are. Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat mainly
suggest locations for people upon uploading in their accounts.
Moreover, users upload the other people as well they are with at the
time of posting. This information can directly help in tracing the
virus spread as we will discuss in the following section:
• Express their opinion and anger: Opinion, sentiment, and fear can be
retrieved from the contextual posts of the user as well as his/her likes
of other posts and articles.
• Socialize with other people: During the quarantine imposed by most
countries around the world, schools and works have shifted to on­
line, and they no longer require physical presence; thus leading
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Sustainable Cities and Society 71 (2021) 102993
people to spend more time at home. They turn to social media in
order to socialize and keep in touch with their loved ones and friends.
All of this information is constantly being uploaded to the fog layer
where social networking platforms run their databases.
Fog Layer: The fog layer is where the social media platforms reside
and run their databases such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube,
and other chatting applications such as WhatsApp and Facebook
messenger. The data uploaded by the users are being stored in fog da­
tabases. Some of the SNS platforms offer an open API to access their
database content for research purposes, whereas others need to be
collected manually in order to study them. Thus, in this paper, we work
with the open Twitter API and make use of their database to retrieve
tweets related to COVID-19 and analyze them.
Cloud Layer: Two main functionalities are running at the cloud
layer: Filtering and Analyzing. In the filtering phase, the data will be
cleaned, and this includes taking out hashtags, links, lowering all the
sentences, and other functionalities that we will explain in detail in the
next section. Subsequentially, the cleaned data will be forwarded to the
analyzing phase, where it will be processed and analyzed in order to
retrieve knowledge and valuable information from it. Details about this
process are discussed in the next section. The results will be forwarded to
the Application layer.
Application Layer: In the last layer, the results of the analyzing phase
and the knowledge gleaned are transmitted to the authorities in order to
make use of the results retrieved from the cloud layer [37–41]. Based on
the results received, authorities such as public healthcare providers and
A. EL Azzaoui et al.
Fig. 3. Process Flow of the Proposed Framework.
governments should be able to make an accurate decision regarding the
virus outbreak and infodemiology. The results help the authorities
predict future outbreak waves based on the user’s shared symptoms and
locations, control the information shared in SNS platforms in order to
track fake news and stop it from spreading further, and understand
people’s fear and opinion regarding the epidemic in order to maintain a
sustainable, healthy smart city.
The proposed framework and solution are not only felicitous for the
COVID-19 epidemic case but must also be used to monitor future virus
outbreaks and manage the situation and public fear before it is too late.
3.2. Structural design with methodological flow
Fig. 3 below presents the methodological flow of our proposed
framework and aids in better understanding of it. We took Twitter as the
SNS platform as it provides researchers with a free API to access all the
openly shared tweets. It starts with a user who decides to share a piece of
certain information on Twitter - this information could be simple
opinion, location (dinner at a certain place or at home with a certain
person), symptoms (users who share that their symptoms are similar to
COVID-19 symptoms online before getting checked), and/or general
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Sustainable Cities and Society 71 (2021) 102993
information about the virus that could be created or shared from another
resource such as web news pages or other Tweets. All of these data are
being collected and crawled and shared with the cloud server where two
functions are mainly done: preprocessing and postprocessing.
Preprocessing: Preprocessing methods include filtering the data
communicated from the fog layer; this step consumes roughly 85% of
knowledge discovery time [33] to filter the data. We followed several
steps as follows:
a) Keywords extraction: Since the platform we were working on is
Twitter, we selected a set of the most used hashtags and collected our
tweets based on it. These hashtags include: #coronavirus, #wuhan­
virus, #COVID-19, #ncov, #lockdown, #2019ncov, and #corona.
These hashtags are the most used on Twitter regarding the COVID-19
topic. Algorithm 1 shows the process of selecting tweets based on
hashtags; we started by connecting the Twitter open API, created a
table where we put all the hashtags, and retrieved all the tweets
where those hashtags are mentioned.
A. EL Azzaoui et al. Sustainable Cities and Society 71 (2021) 102993

of tweets in the Tokenized Tweets table. For frequency of word wi ,

nw is the total number of wi in the Tokenized Tweets. The sum of nk
b) Tokenization: Tokenization is the process wherein words are trans­ is the total number of all words in the Tokenized Tweets table.
formed from normal strings into meaningful terms in order to facil­ Equation 1 explains this step:
itate the analysis phase [34]. The tokenization action removes any nw
special characters, numbers, and symbols from the text. These TF(w, t) = ∑ (1)
nk
characters are called tokens. Algorithm 1 depicts the tokenization k

process. After establishing the connection and collecting the tweets Inverse Document Frequency is a logarithm of the ratio of the
based on the given hashtags, we created a table and associated the number of all tweets of the Tokenized Tweets table to the number of
special characters, such as “RT” mention, which refers to a retweeted words within tweets with term wi . Equation 2 depicts this phase:
tweet, “@” symbol, which is used to tag a user, and “#” symbol used
to highlight the keywords and numbers. The function Replace is log|T|
IDF (w, T) = (2)
responsible for putting a space in place of those special characters. |{ti ε T| w ε ti } |
c) Lemmatization and clustering: In linguistics, lemmatization is the
TF-IDF is the product of TF(w, t) to IDF (w, T) as shown in equation
process of grouping together the inflected forms of a word so that
3:
they can be analyzed as a single item and identified by the word’s
lemma, or dictionary form. In data analysis science, this method can TF − IDF = TF(w, t) . IDF (w, T) (3)
be referred to as clustering. A lot of tweets are similar, and this may
Clustering all the tweets and organize is a necessary step to expedite
create data noise. Thus, clustering tweets based on their similarities
the post-analysis process.
saves us more time in the post-analysis phase. The clustering algo­
rithm is based on a machine learning concept called Term Frequency
- Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF). The TF-IDF is a matrix
where a Tokenized Tweets table resulting from algorithm 1 is
referred to as t and the words within it are referred to as w. The
frequency is the ratio number of the current word to the total number

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A. EL Azzaoui et al. Sustainable Cities and Society 71 (2021) 102993

Table 2 d) Feature extraction: Subsequent to the keywords’ extraction, tokeni­

Subjectivity and Polarity Metric zation, and lemmatization phases, the remaining necessary step is
Subjectivity Polarity feature extraction, which is the aspect wherein the main character­
istics of the tweet are being excerpted. The results will be used as the
Scale 0 1 − 1 1
Explanation Objective Subjective Negative Positive fuel of the post-processing stage. These features include user loca­
tion, mentioned symptoms in the tweets, subjectivity, and polarity.
Starting with the user location, we used the location provided by the
user in the location field from the tweet meta-data. Aside from the
city or country, we focused more on precise locations such as

Fig. 4. Example of Subjectivity and Polarity results.

8
A. EL Azzaoui et al.
Fig. 5. Detailed Methodology Flowchart.
restaurant name, workplace, school name, and so on. Algorithm 2
presents the pseudo-code used to retrieve the user location. We used
the Tokenization Table obtained from algorithm 1, fetched through it
all the qualified Tweets, and searched if the location field is pro­
vided. If the case is true, we created a table with all the users and
their respective locations. This table will serve to predict future
possible outbreak cases. As for the subjectivity and polarity analysis,
it is a method that provides clear understanding of the user’s atti­
tude, opinion, and sentiment using NLP techniques. As part of
sentiment analyses using NLP, the subjectivity analysis classifies
texts as opinionated or non-opinionated [35]. Adjectives, adverbs,
and certain verbs and nouns were used as indicators of a subjective
opinion. On the other hand, polarity analysis was performed after the
subjectivity analysis in order to define if the opinion is positive or
negative.
9
Sustainable Cities and Society 71 (2021) 102993
Commensurate with the subjectivity analysis, to extract the polarity
result, we used python TextBlob for NLP. The results varied between -1
and 1 where negative scores represent a negative opinion, and positive
scores denote a positive opinion. Scores with 0 suggest a neutral point of
view (Table 2).
Algorithm 3 presents the pseudo-code of the abovementioned steps,
whereas Fig. 4 shows an example of 100 tweets retrieved using the
previously mentioned methods. This method supports detecting fake
news as well. Fake news mainly shares the same characteristics, tend to
be more negative, and show a very subjective score. Based on that, we
retrieved the suspected tweets and compared them with fake news da­
tabases provided by multiple researchers in order to delete them from
our database if the similarity is high, and tweets from the same user will
not be used in the future. Fig. 5 presents the detailed methodological
flowchart of the proposed framework.
A. EL Azzaoui et al. Sustainable Cities and Society 71 (2021) 102993

Fig. 6. Categories of USA population in COVID-19 case.

Fig. 7. Prediction results compared with confirmed results.

Fig. 8. Median Prediction Factor.

10
A. EL Azzaoui et al. Sustainable Cities and Society 71 (2021) 102993

Fig. 9. Predicted and Confirmed COVID-19 Cases Based on Days.

4. Analysis and discussion

After gathering the data from Twitter, filtering it, and organizing it
based on sentiment analysis, we will apply in this section deep learning
on the data in order to retrieve and extract knowledge to build a possible
prediction of the virus outbreak based on people’s locations and shared
symptoms and questions. This method will allow us to have an overview
of potential future COVID-19 cases and take fast actions to prevent
further spread.

4.1. Numerical results

In order to test the feasibility of our proposed model, we simulated it

on an i-7 computer with 64 bits. The data were collected for this specific
prediction simulation during a two months period from August 1, 2020
until September 30, 2020. Data collection was done using Python for
Twitter on Google collab. In order to simplify the task, we took the
United States of America as the location where we retrieved and
analyzed the data. The total number of tweets collected is 10000. 38% of
users age is between 18 and 29 years old, while 26% are between 30 and
49 years old. 56% male and 44% female. We used these data to feed the
deep learning algorithm in order to extract a prediction from it. After­
ward, we compared the results with the actual COVID-19 cases in the Fig. 10. Comparative result analysis.
USA. For this proposition, we used the SIR (Susceptible, Infected,
Recovered) model wherein we divided the data collected and filtered
from Twitter into 3 categories based on the symptoms and confirmation
shared by the users, and these categories are shown in Fig. 6.
The module is based on the assumption of transmitting the COVID-19 Table 3
virus throughout the direct or indirect contact from the infected case’s Comparative result analysis based on different models.
category to susceptible case people [36]. In our proposition, we used as Model Name Model Description Prediction Results
data set the filtered information retrieved from Twitter accounts based Logistic A 0.999
P =
on the USA. Infected cases who previously shared their locations and
( )
L− x
+2
people they have met are a potential virus transmitter to susceptible
((4μ)∗
1+e A
Linear P = Ax − B 0.557
cases. After dividing the data into three categories, we analyzed it based
Logarithmic P = A + Blog⁡(x) 0.289
on the movement and contact of the infected cases, removed the death
Quadratic P = A + Bx + Cx2 0.88
and recovered cases from the calculation, and excluded newborn cases
in this simulation as the period is relatively small. Cubic P = A + Bx + Cx2 + Dx3 0.982

In order to calculate the progress of individuals in the susceptible Compound P = ABx 0.977
cases category by time-series, we used the following differential equa­ Power P = AxB 0.702
tion: Exponential P = AxB 0.977
SNS Analysis P = I0 eα− β 0.989

11
A. EL Azzaoui et al. Sustainable Cities and Society 71 (2021) 102993

Table 4
Comparison based on key considerations.
Research work Year Twitter Method/Software/Hardware Sustainability Security Availability Integrity

[24] 2016 Yes Structural equation modeling. No No Yes Yes

MPlus V6.1
[25] 2020 Yes NLP, Yes No Yes Yes
Python.
[26] 2020 Yes Python No Yes Yes No
[27] 2020 Yes Google Colab. No No Yes Yes
Python.
[28] 2020 Yes Google Colab Yes Yes No No
Python
[30] 2018 Yes HBase. Yes No Yes Yes
Raspberry pi
[31] 2010 Yes Support vector machines Yes Yes No Yes
Our Contribution 2020 Yes Google Colab Yes Yes Yes Yes
Python

dS information as they mainly share the same vocabulary and grammatical

= − αSI (4)
dt
S and I refer to Susceptible and Infected cases, respectively. α is the
reproduction rate per day of the differential equation used to regulate
the susceptible infectious contact. In the early stages of the outbreak, the
value of I is negligible, and the value of S is approximated to be equal to
1. By the time the virus outbreak progresses, the value of I becomes
larger, whereas the value of S gradually declines. Thus, the accession dI dt
becomes linear, and the infected category can be calculated as follows:
dI
= αSI − βI (5)
dt
Where β represents the daily rate regulator of new infections based on
the quantification of the number of infected cases in the transmission.
Moreover, removed cases R, which represents the category of people
who have been cured of the virus or who died, can be calculated as
follows:
characteristics. Detecting the suspected fake information and comparing
it with the Fake news database provided by various researchers support
our filtering system to delete those data and information from the
analysis phase.
Although we only provided one example of SNS big data analysis
based on only one SNS platform in this work, we strongly believe that it
is the main pillar for controlling the current COVID-19 outbreak as well
as future pandemics in smart cities. Researchers should make use of the
openly shared data on SNS platforms and focus more on improving SNS
big data analysis methods for a better understanding of users’ fear and
sentiments and to provide oversight and manage serious pandemics. Our
future research focal point is an automated fake news and information
detection tool on SNS platforms, which will support this proposed model
and provide a better data set to analyze.
4.2. Comparative analysis and discussion

dR
= βI
dt
Based on the equations above, the prediction of future potential
outbreak using Twitter data can be calculated as follows:
I (t) ≈ I0 eα− β
We computed the data previously retrieved and filtered from Twitter
in order to run a simulation and compared our predicted results with the
accurate confirmed results in the USA between 01/08/2020 and 31/08/
2020. The regression model shows an accuracy of 0.81. Fig. 7 shows the
prediction results.
In order to evaluate the accuracy of the proposed model, we calcu­
lated the median prediction factor. Results showed that the factor varies
between 0.8 and 1.2 as depicted in Fig. 8, presenting a fair model for
predicting future outbreak cases.
The median factor can be calculated as follows:
M=
P
C models for USA COVID-19 cases fitted by GWO, we compare those re­
Where, P refers to the predicted cases and C is the confirmed cases by
legal authorities.
Big data SNS analysis can provide us with a strong tool to manage
and control a pandemic such as COVID-19; people in the areas of smart
city and IoT rely more on their smartphone and connected devices to
inform themselves about everything including a serious global
pandemic. The data shared on SNS platforms is very meaningful as it can
inform us about the user’s condition, help us understand the user’s
sentiments, and predict future outbreak hotspots based on the user’s
movements, locations, and symptoms. Moreover, based on the sentiment
analysis performed on the SNS platform, we can detect fake news and
(6) Based on the above-mentioned methods and the results of median
prediction factor, we retrieve the confirmed COVID-19 cases of the last 7
days and compare it with the predicted cases in the last 14 days. Results
depicted in Fig. 9 show that our proposed method can predict the next
COVID-19 outbreak and hotspots with approximately 7 days earlier than
(7) the government authorities. The dots represent the outbreak cluster.
Following SNS big data analysis method, authorities can benefit from an
earlier prediction of COVID-19 and alike crises situation and hotspots
outbreak, which support virus control and provides a better under­
standing on people opinions and their tendency to follow the govern­
ment guidance.
We compared as well our results with other state-of-arts outcomes,
although those papers do not use SNS information as a data base to
calculate and predict the virus outbreak, they tend to use other methods
based on machine learning models powered by Grey Wolf Optimization
(GWO) method including linear, logarithmic, quadratic, cubic, com­
pound, power, exponential, and logistic as depicted and explained in
(8) [35]. The authors calculated the prediction results of machine learning
sults with our model and explain them in Table 3 and visually depicted
in Fig. 10.
Based on the above-mentioned results, our model achieves a 0.989
prediction result as depicted in Table 3 compared to other machine
learning methods, which make it suitable to be used in COVID-19
outbreak prediction [44] and control by the authorities. Moreover, we
compared the previous-mentioned related works based on four key
considerations including sustainability, security, availability, and
integrity. Unlike other works who used Twitter as a data base for
COVID-19 and alike crises outbreak prediction, our model covers the
four key consideration as depicted in Table 4.
SNS big data analysis is a critical solution that urges more

12
A. EL Azzaoui et al.
development in order to be applied on SSHC. Using this proposed
framework, we can predict future potential COVID-19 cases and
outbreak cluster seven days earlier than the confirmed cases were
announced, allowing governments to apply national or regional lock­
down a few days in advance, and control the virus propagation. As far as
we know, until the moment of writing this paper, and compared with
other researches, we are the only work that combined sentimental
analysis, fake news detection, deleting fake news as well as users’
identity from our analyzed database, and predicting the virus outbreak
before the confirmed cases. The results of this research proved to be
adaptable for SSHC environment as it achieves a 0.989 prediction re­
sults, which contribute directly in the maintenance and sustainability of
the services provided by smart cities to its citizens, thus, improving the
QoL and KPI of SSHC. However, we have only simulated our proposed
scheme on Twitter API data. Moreover, we have analyzed tweets from
one geospatial location and based on one langue (English). In our future
work, we aim to cover these limitations and address them thoughtfully
by analyzing data from multiple SNS platforms such as Facebook and
YouTube and including more linguistic and geospatial options.
5. Conclusion
To avoid the calamity of COVID-19 during the global pandemic
outbreak, a SSHC urges fast and accurate SNS big data analysis man­
agement to handle a pandemic such as COVID-19. Motivated by the
advancement of these technologies and the rapid development of Social
Networking Service (SNS), this paper proposed an infodemiology study
to predict the epidemic outbreak and track its spread across a global
shared framework, we considered Twitter as a case study for our
framework as it provide researchers with an API to collect various and
openly shared tweets, we collected tweets from USA users during one
month period, and analyzed them using preprocess methods including
key word extraction, redundancy removal, tokenization, lemmatization,
and feature extraction. The proposed framework achieved a results of
seven days earlier outbreak prediction with a 0.989 indicator results,
thus enhancing the control of this pandemic situation, aids in reducing
the infection cases by predicting potential virus carriers several days
earlier and supports understanding of users’ fear and sentiment and
their tendency to follow authorities’ regulations. SNS big data are a tool
that should be used in future research as they provide us with an over­
sight of the situation and help control a serious pandemic such as
COVID-19, and to maintain the KPI in SSHC by improving the healthcare
services provided to its citizens. Future research direction will cover the
limitations of this work and address the dilemma of analyzing multiple
SNS platforms in different linguistics and geospatial options.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors report no declarations of interest.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of
Korea (NRF) with a grant funded by the Korea government (NRF-
2019R1A2B5B01070416).
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