Analysis of public opinion on food safety in Greater China with big data and machine learning

The Internet contains a wealth of public opinion on food safety, including views on food adulteration, food-borne diseases, agricultural pollution, irregular food distribution, and food production issues. To systematically collect and analyze public opinion on food safety in Greater China, we developed IFoodCloud, which automatically collects data from more than 3,100 public sources. Meanwhile, we constructed sentiment classification models using multiple lexicon-based and machine learning-based algorithms integrated with IFoodCloud that provide an unprecedented rapid means of understanding the public sentiment toward specific food safety incidents. Our best model’s F1 score achieved 0.9737, demonstrating its great predictive ability and robustness. Using IFoodCloud, we analyzed public sentiment on food safety in Greater China and the changing trend of public opinion at the early stage of the 2019 Coronavirus Disease pandemic, demonstrating the potential of big data and machine learning for promoting risk communication and decision-making. [Display omitted] •IFoodCloud collects public opinion on food safety from >3,100 data sources.•Sentiment classification models using multiple machine learning and lexicon-based algorithms.•F1 score of long short-term memory model on sentiment classification achieved 0.9737•IFoodCloud can be used to explore public opinion trends on food safety issues.