Development of Keyword Trend Prediction Models for Obesity Before and After the COVID-19 Pandemic Using RNN and LSTM: Analyzing the News Big Data of South Korea

Abstract

The Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (2020) reported that the prevalence of obesity (≥19 years old) was 31.4% in 2011, but it increased to 33.8% in 2019 and 38.3% in 2020, which confirmed that it increased rapidly after the outbreak of COVID-19. Obesity increases not only the risk of infection with COVID-19 but also severity and fatality rate after being infected with COVID-19 compared to people with normal weight or underweight. Therefore, identifying the difference in potential factors for obesity before and after the pandemic is an important issue in health science. This study identified the keywords and topics that were formed before and after the COVID-19 pandemic in the South Korean society and how they had been changing by conducting a web crawling of South Korea's news big data using “obesity” as a keyword. This study also developed models for predicting timing before and after the COVID-19 pandemic using keywords. Topic modeling results was found that the trend of keywords was different between before the COVID-19 pandemic and after the COVID-19 pandemic: topics such as “degenerative arthritis”, “diet,” and “side effects of diet treatment” were derived before the COVID-19 pandemic, while topics such as “COVID blues” and “relationship between dietary behavior and disease” were confirmed after the COVID-19 pandemic. This study also showed that both RNN and LSTM had high accuracy (over 97%), but the accuracy of the RNN model (98.22%) had higher than that of the LSTM model (97.12%) by 0.24%. Based on the results of this study, it will be necessary to continuously pay attention to the newly added obesity-related factors after the COVID-19 pandemic and to prepare countermeasures at the social level based on the results of this study.