Machine Learning-based Approach for Depression Detection in Twitter Using Content and Activity Features

Social media channels, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, have altered our world forever. People are now increasingly connected than ever and reveal a sort of digital persona. Although social media certainly has several remarkable features, the demerits are undeniable as well. Recent studies have indicated a correlation between high usage of social media sites and increased depression. The present study aims to exploit machine learning techniques for detecting a probable depressed Twitter user based on both, his/her network behavior and tweets. For this purpose, we trained and tested classifiers to distinguish whether a user is depressed or not using features extracted from his/ her activities in the network and tweets. The results showed that the more features are used, the higher are the accuracy and F-measure scores in detecting depressed users. This method is a data-driven, predictive approach for early detection of depression or other mental illnesses. This study's main contribution is the exploration part of the features and its impact on detecting the depression level.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figures, journal articl

Anxious Depression Prediction in Real-time Social Data

Mental well-being and social media have been closely related domains of study. In this research a novel model, AD prediction model, for anxious depression prediction in real-time tweets is proposed. This mixed anxiety-depressive disorder is a predominantly associated with erratic thought process, restlessness and sleeplessness. Based on the linguistic cues and user posting patterns, the feature set is defined using a 5-tuple vector <word, timing, frequency, sentiment, contrast>. An anxiety-related lexicon is built to detect the presence of anxiety indicators. Time and frequency of tweet is analyzed for irregularities and opinion polarity analytics is done to find inconsistencies in posting behaviour. The model is trained using three classifiers (multinomial na\"ive bayes, gradient boosting, and random forest) and majority voting using an ensemble voting classifier is done. Preliminary results are evaluated for tweets of sampled 100 users and the proposed model achieves a classification accuracy of 85.09%

Depression Severity Estimation from Multiple Modalities

Depression is a major debilitating disorder which can affect people from all ages. With a continuous increase in the number of annual cases of depression, there is a need to develop automatic techniques for the detection of the presence and extent of depression. In this AVEC challenge we explore different modalities (speech, language and visual features extracted from face) to design and develop automatic methods for the detection of depression. In psychology literature, the PHQ-8 questionnaire is well established as a tool for measuring the severity of depression. In this paper we aim to automatically predict the PHQ-8 scores from features extracted from the different modalities. We show that visual features extracted from facial landmarks obtain the best performance in terms of estimating the PHQ-8 results with a mean absolute error (MAE) of 4.66 on the development set. Behavioral characteristics from speech provide an MAE of 4.73. Language features yield a slightly higher MAE of 5.17. When switching to the test set, our Turn Features derived from audio transcriptions achieve the best performance, scoring an MAE of 4.11 (corresponding to an RMSE of 4.94), which makes our system the winner of the AVEC 2017 depression sub-challenge.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figur

Knowledge Transferring via Model Aggregation for Online Social Care

The Internet and the Web are being increasingly used in proactive social care to provide people, especially the vulnerable, with a better life and services, and their derived social services generate enormous data. However, the strict protection of privacy makes user's data become an isolated island and limits the predictive performance of standalone clients. To enable effective proactive social care and knowledge sharing within intelligent agents, this paper develops a knowledge transferring framework via model aggregation. Under this framework, distributed clients perform on-device training, and a third-party server integrates multiple clients' models and redistributes to clients for knowledge transferring among users. To improve the generalizability of the knowledge sharing, we further propose a novel model aggregation algorithm, namely the average difference descent aggregation (AvgDiffAgg for short). In particular, to evaluate the effectiveness of the learning algorithm, we use a case study on the early detection and prevention of suicidal ideation, and the experiment results on four datasets derived from social communities demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed learning method

Using Social Media to Predict the Future: A Systematic Literature Review

Social media (SM) data provides a vast record of humanity's everyday thoughts, feelings, and actions at a resolution previously unimaginable. Because user behavior on SM is a reflection of events in the real world, researchers have realized they can use SM in order to forecast, making predictions about the future. The advantage of SM data is its relative ease of acquisition, large quantity, and ability to capture socially relevant information, which may be difficult to gather from other data sources. Promising results exist across a wide variety of domains, but one will find little consensus regarding best practices in either methodology or evaluation. In this systematic review, we examine relevant literature over the past decade, tabulate mixed results across a number of scientific disciplines, and identify common pitfalls and best practices. We find that SM forecasting is limited by data biases, noisy data, lack of generalizable results, a lack of domain-specific theory, and underlying complexity in many prediction tasks. But despite these shortcomings, recurring findings and promising results continue to galvanize researchers and demand continued investigation. Based on the existing literature, we identify research practices which lead to success, citing specific examples in each case and making recommendations for best practices. These recommendations will help researchers take advantage of the exciting possibilities offered by SM platforms

Cognitive computation of brain disorders based primarily on ocular responses

The present review presents multiple techniques in which ocular assessments may serve as a noninvasive approach for the early diagnoses of various cognitive and psychiatric disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease (AD), autism spectrum disorder (ASD), schizophrenia (SZ), and major depressive disorder (MDD). Real-time ocular responses are tightly associated with emotional and cognitive processing within the central nervous system. Patterns seen in saccades, pupillary responses, and blinking, as well as retinal microvasculature and morphology visualized via office-based ophthalmic imaging, are potential biomarkers for the screening and evaluation of cognitive and psychiatric disorders. Additionally, rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) present a growing opportunity to use machine-learning-based AI, especially deep-learning neural networks, to shed new light on the field of cognitive neuroscience, which may lead to novel evaluations and interventions via ocular approaches for cognitive and psychiatric disorders

Machine Learning pipeline for discovering neuroimaging-based biomarkers in neurology and psychiatry

We consider a problem of diagnostic pattern recognition/classification from neuroimaging data. We propose a common data analysis pipeline for neuroimaging-based diagnostic classification problems using various ML algorithms and processing toolboxes for brain imaging. We illustrate the pipeline application by discovering new biomarkers for diagnostics of epilepsy and depression based on clinical and MRI/fMRI data for patients and healthy volunteers.Comment: 20 pages, 2 figure

Survey on RGB, 3D, Thermal, and Multimodal Approaches for Facial Expression Recognition: History, Trends, and Affect-related Applications

Facial expressions are an important way through which humans interact socially. Building a system capable of automatically recognizing facial expressions from images and video has been an intense field of study in recent years. Interpreting such expressions remains challenging and much research is needed about the way they relate to human affect. This paper presents a general overview of automatic RGB, 3D, thermal and multimodal facial expression analysis. We define a new taxonomy for the field, encompassing all steps from face detection to facial expression recognition, and describe and classify the state of the art methods accordingly. We also present the important datasets and the bench-marking of most influential methods. We conclude with a general discussion about trends, important questions and future lines of research

Did You Really Just Have a Heart Attack? Towards Robust Detection of Personal Health Mentions in Social Media

Millions of users share their experiences on social media sites, such as Twitter, which in turn generate valuable data for public health monitoring, digital epidemiology, and other analyses of population health at global scale. The first, critical, task for these applications is classifying whether a personal health event was mentioned, which we call the (PHM) problem. This task is challenging for many reasons, including typically short length of social media posts, inventive spelling and lexicons, and figurative language, including hyperbole using diseases like "heart attack" or "cancer" for emphasis, and not as a health self-report. This problem is even more challenging for rarely reported, or frequent but ambiguously expressed conditions, such as "stroke". To address this problem, we propose a general, robust method for detecting PHMs in social media, which we call WESPAD, that combines lexical, syntactic, word embedding-based, and context-based features. WESPAD is able to generalize from few examples by automatically distorting the word embedding space to most effectively detect the true health mentions. Unlike previously proposed state-of-the-art supervised and deep-learning techniques, WESPAD requires relatively little training data, which makes it possible to adapt, with minimal effort, to each new disease and condition. We evaluate WESPAD on both an established publicly available Flu detection benchmark, and on a new dataset that we have constructed with mentions of multiple health conditions. Our experiments show that WESPAD outperforms the baselines and state-of-the-art methods, especially in cases when the number and proportion of true health mentions in the training data is small.Comment: WWW 201

Utilizing Neural Networks and Linguistic Metadata for Early Detection of Depression Indications in Text Sequences

Depression is ranked as the largest contributor to global disability and is also a major reason for suicide. Still, many individuals suffering from forms of depression are not treated for various reasons. Previous studies have shown that depression also has an effect on language usage and that many depressed individuals use social media platforms or the internet in general to get information or discuss their problems. This paper addresses the early detection of depression using machine learning models based on messages on a social platform. In particular, a convolutional neural network based on different word embeddings is evaluated and compared to a classification based on user-level linguistic metadata. An ensemble of both approaches is shown to achieve state-of-the-art results in a current early detection task. Furthermore, the currently popular ERDE score as metric for early detection systems is examined in detail and its drawbacks in the context of shared tasks are illustrated. A slightly modified metric is proposed and compared to the original score. Finally, a new word embedding was trained on a large corpus of the same domain as the described task and is evaluated as well.Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE and has been accepted for future publication in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible. 14 pages, 3 figures, 7 table