Analysis of Parkinson’s Disease using Deep Learning and Word Embedding Models

Parkinsons disease is a common neurodegenerative neurological disorder, which affects the patients quality of life, has significant social and economic effects, and is difficult to diagnose early due to the gradual appearance of symptoms. Examining the discussion of Parkinson’s disease in social media platforms such as Twitter provides a platform where patients communicate each other in both diagnosis and treatment stage of the Parkinson’s disease. The purpose of this work is to evaluate and compare the sentiment analysis of people about Parkinsons disease by using deep learning and word embedding models. To the best of our knowledge, this is the very first study to analyze Parkinsons disease from social media by using word embedding models and deep learning algorithms. In this study, Word2Vec, GloVe, and FastText are employed as word embedding models for the purpose of enriching tweets in terms of semantic, context, and syntax. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), and Long Short-Term Memory Networks (LSTMs) are implemented for the classification task. This study demonstrates the efficiency of using word embedding models and deep learning algorithms to understand the needs of patients’ and provide a valuable contribution to the treatment process by analyzing sentiments of them with 93.63% accuracy performance.