Author(s)

Hussein Baalbaki¹, Hassan Harb^1,2, Chamseddine Zaki², Youssef Alakoury³, Layla Tannoury¹, Michel Nabaa¹

¹Faculty of Sciences, Lebanese University, Beirut, Lebanon.
²Faculty of Business Administration and Economics, Lebanese University, Rashaya, Lebanon.
³Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences, Lebanese University, Zahle, Lebanon.

Recently, the COVID-19 emerged in China and propagated around all the world has threatened millions of people and affected most countries and governments at several sides such as economical, educational, tourism, healthcare, etc. Indeed, one of the most important challenges that directly affect the people is the psychological side due to the harsh policies imposed by public authorities in most countries. In this paper, we propose a framework called CRISE that allows studying and understanding the psychological effect of COVID-19 during the lockdown period. Mainly, CRISE consists of four data stages: Collection, tRansformation, reductIon, and cluStEring. The first stage collects data from more than 2000 participants through a questionnaire containing attributes related to psychological effect before and during the lockdown. The second stage aims to preprocess the data before performing the study stage. The third stage proposes a model that finds the similarities among the attributes, based on the correlation matrix, to reduce its number. Finally, the fourth stage introduces a new version of Kmeans algorithm, called as Jaccard-based Kmeans (JKmeans), that allows to group participants having similar psychological situation in the same cluster for a later analysis. We show the effectiveness of CRISE in terms of clustering accuracy and understanding the psychological effect of COVID-19.

COVID-19, Mental Health, Data Clustering, Similarity Function, Data Reduction, Correlation Matrix

Baalbaki, H. , Harb, H. , Zaki, C. , Alakoury, Y. , Tannoury, L. and Nabaa, M. (2021) CRISE: Toward Better Understanding of COVID-19 Psychological Impact during Lockdown. Journal of Computer and Communications, 9, 13-31. doi: 10.4236/jcc.2021.98002.