Sentiment Analysis of COVID-19 Booster Vaccines on Twitter Using Multi-Class Support Vector Machine

The Indonesian government's implementation of a booster vaccination program as part of its COVID-19 response has generated diverse public reactions, particularly on social media platforms like Twitter. This study aims to analyze public sentiment regarding booster vaccines by examining Twitter data to understand the prevailing discourse and attitudes toward this policy. The research employs sentiment analysis, a text mining and processing technique, to classify tweets into positive, neutral, and negative categories. The study utilizes the Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm, evaluating its performance through a multi-class parameter assessment. Two multi-class strategies, One-against-one (OAO) and One-against-rest (OAR) are combined with various kernels (Sigmoid, Polynomial, and RBF) to identify the most accurate model for sentiment classification. The results show that the OAO method with the RBF kernel achieves the highest accuracy of 96%, outperforming other combinations like OAO with Polynomial (95.2%) and Sigmoid (93.7%) kernels. Similarly, the RBF kernel performs best with 95.5% accuracy in the OAR approach. Using the optimal model, sentiment analysis classifies 49 tweets as positive, 927 as neutral, and 24 as negative, revealing a predominantly neutral public sentiment with limited positive and negative opinions. In conclusion, this study demonstrates the effectiveness of SVM, particularly the OAO method with the RBF kernel, for sentiment analysis of social media data. The findings provide insights into public perceptions of the booster vaccine program, offering policymakers a data-driven basis for designing targeted communication strategies to address concerns and enhance public acceptance.