Feature selection with a deep learning based high-performance computing model for traffic flow analysis of Twitter data

Abstract

In the past decade, social media networks have received much attention among ordinary people, agencies, and research scholars. Twitter is one of the fastest-growing social media tools. By means of the Twitter application on smartphones, users are able to immediately report events happening around them on a real-time basis. The information disseminated by millions of active users every day generates a new version of a dynamic database that contains information about various topics. Twitter data can be utilized as a major traffic data source along with conventional sensors. In this aspect, this paper presents a novel firefly algorithm-based feature selection with a deep learning model for traffic flow analysis (FFAFS-DLTFA) using Twitter data. The goal of FFAFS-DLTFA is to determine the class labels for tweets as relevant to traffic events. The proposed FFAFS-DLTFA encompasses several processes, such as preprocessing, feature extraction, feature selection, and classification. Primarily, tweets are preprocessed in several ways, such as tokenization, removal of stop words, and stemming. At the same time, three types of embedding vectors, unigram, bigram, and POS features, are used. In addition, the firefly algorithm (FFA) is applied for the optimal selection of feature subsets. Finally, a deep neural network (DNN) model is applied for the identification of tweets into three classes, namely, positive, neutral, and negative. The performance validation of FFAFS-DLTFA takes place using the benchmark Kaggle repository, and the results are inspected under different aspects. The experimental values demonstrate the better performance of FFAFS-DLTFA on the other techniques with the maximum accuracy of 98.83%.