Fuzzy SVM With Mahalanobis Distance for Situational Awareness-Based Recognition of Public Health Emergencies

In public health emergencies, situational awareness is crucial for swift responses by governments and rescue organizations. In this manuscript, a novel framework is proposed to identify and classify event-specific information, aiming to comprehend concepts, characteristics, and classifications associated with situational awareness in social media emergencies. First, a statistical approach is employed to extract a set of standard features. Second, a category-based latent dirichlet allocation to vector (LDA2vec) model is leveraged to extract topic-based features to enhance accuracy, particularly for unbalanced datasets. Finally, a fuzzy support vector machine (FSVM) classifier utilizing the Mahalanobis distance kernel is introduced to improve the detection accuracy of event-specific information. The framework's effectiveness is evaluated using the social media public health dataset, achieving superior filtering capabilities for non-informative data with a precision of 89% and an F1-Score of 91%, surpassing other standard methods.