Statistical Learning Theory and ELM for Big Social Data Analysis

The science of opinion analysis based on data from social networks and other forms of mass media has garnered the interest of the scientific community and the business world. Dealing with the increasing amount of information present on the Web is a critical task and requires efficient models developed by the emerging field of sentiment analysis. To this end, current research proposes an efficient approach to support emotion recognition and polarity detection in natural language text. In this paper, we show how to exploit the most recent technological tools and advances in Statistical Learning Theory (SLT) in order to efficiently build an Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) and assess the resultant model's performance when applied to big social data analysis. ELM represents a powerful learning tool, developed to overcome some issues in back-propagation networks. The main problem with ELM is in training them to work in the event of a large number of available samples, where the generalization performance has to be carefully assessed. For this reason, we propose an ELM implementation that exploits the Spark distributed in memory technology and show how to take advantage of the most recent advances in SLT in order to address the issue of selecting ELM hyperparameters that give the best generalization performance.