Deep learning and sentiment analysis framework for classifying YouTube home-fitness videos

This study introduces a deep learning (DL) framework designed to classify YouTube videos into five exercise categories: TABATA, cardiorespiratory endurance, free weight muscular endurance, training aid muscular endurance, and flexibility. These categories were identified by two domain experts in sports science based on video content, tags, and user interaction patterns. Utilizing data from 1284 Traditional Chinese-language YouTube videos and 39,141 comments posted between March 2023 and June 2024, we applied text preparation techniques and sentiment analysis to clean and analyze the dataset. The study incorporated five key features—titles, hashtags, descriptions, comments, and sentiment, and employed Word2Vec with the Continuous Bag of Words (CBOW) model for word embedding, effectively handling short YouTube comments. We evaluated several predictive models, including Support Vector Machine (SVM), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBOOST), Text Convolutional Neural Network (TextCNN), Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM), CNN-BiLSTM, and BERT, using 10-fold cross-validation and comparing their performance based on accuracy, precision, recall, and F-measure. The results indicate that BERT outperformed the other models, achieving an accuracy of 92.25% (based on 10-fold cross-validation) when all five features were used. Incorporating sentiment analysis enhanced prediction performance across all models, with an average accuracy improvement of 3.85%. Ablation analysis confirmed the significant role of sentiment in improving prediction outcomes. Furthermore, a paired samples t-test revealed statistically significant differences in performance metrics when sentiment was included as a feature. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of combining deep learning and sentiment analysis to predict home-based exercise video categories on YouTube, offering valuable insights into content trends and user engagement in the evolving digital fitness landscape.