Exploring the Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire, Clinical Impairment Assessment, and Autism Quotient to Identify Eating Disorder Vulnerability: A Cluster Analysis

Eating disorders are very complicated and many factors play a role in their manifestation. Furthermore, due to the variability in diagnosis and symptoms, treatment for an eating disorder is unique to the individual. As a result, there are numerous assessment tools available, which range from brief survey questionnaires to in-depth interviews conducted by a professional. One of the many benefits to using machine learning is that it offers new insight into datasets that researchers may not previously have, particularly when compared to traditional statistical methods. The aim of this paper was to employ k-means clustering to explore the Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire, Clinical Impairment Assessment, and Autism Quotient scores. The goal is to identify prevalent cluster topologies in the data, using the truth data as a means to validate identified groupings. Our results show that a model with k = 2 performs the best and clustered the dataset in the most appropriate way. This matches our truth data group labels, and we calculated our model’s accuracy at 78.125%, so we know that our model is working well. We see that the Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire (EDE-Q) and Clinical Impairment Assessment (CIA) scores are, in fact, important discriminators of eating disorder behavior

Explainable depression detection with multi-aspect features using a hybrid deep learning model on social media

The ability to explain why the model produced results in such a way is an important problem, especially in the medical domain. Model explainability is important for building trust by providing insight into the model prediction. However, most existing machine learning methods provide no explainability, which is worrying. For instance, in the task of automatic depression prediction, most machine learning models lead to predictions that are obscure to humans. In this work, we propose explainable Multi-Aspect Depression Detection with Hierarchical Attention Network MDHAN, for automatic detection of depressed users on social media and explain the model prediction. We have considered user posts augmented with additional features from Twitter. Specifically, we encode user posts using two levels of attention mechanisms applied at the tweet-level and word-level, calculate each tweet and words’ importance, and capture semantic sequence features from the user timelines (posts). Our hierarchical attention model is developed in such a way that it can capture patterns that leads to explainable results. Our experiments show that MDHAN outperforms several popular and robust baseline methods, demonstrating the effectiveness of combining deep learning with multi-aspect features. We also show that our model helps improve predictive performance when detecting depression in users who are posting messages publicly on social media. MDHAN achieves excellent performance and ensures adequate evidence to explain the prediction

Social media mental health analysis framework through applied computational approaches

Studies have shown that mental illness burdens not only public health and productivity but also established market economies throughout the world. However, mental disorders are difficult to diagnose and monitor through traditional methods, which heavily rely on interviews, questionnaires and surveys, resulting in high under-diagnosis and under-treatment rates. The increasing use of online social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, is now a common part of people’s everyday life. The continuous and real-time user-generated content often reflects feelings, opinions, social status and behaviours of individuals, creating an unprecedented wealth of person-specific information. With advances in data science, social media has already been increasingly employed in population health monitoring and more recently mental health applications to understand mental disorders as well as to develop online screening and intervention tools. However, existing research efforts are still in their infancy, primarily aimed at highlighting the potential of employing social media in mental health research. The majority of work is developed on ad hoc datasets and lacks a systematic research pipeline. [Continues.]</div

Early risk detection of anorexia on social media

Comunicació presentada a: INSCI 2018 celebrada del 24 al 26 d'octubre de 2018 a Sant Petersburg, Rússia.This paper proposes an approach for the early detection of anorexia nervosa (AN) on social media. We present a machine learning approach that processes the texts written by social media users. This method relies on a set of features based on domain-specific vocabulary, topics, psychological processes, and linguistic information extracted from the users’ writings. This approach penalizes the delay in detecting positive cases in order to classify the users in risk as early as possible. Identifying anorexia early, along with an appropriate treatment, improves the speed of recovery and the likelihood of staying free of the illness. The results of this work showed that our proposal is suitable for the early detection of AN symptoms.This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the Maria de Maeztu Units of Excellence Programme (MDM-2015-0502)

Early risk detection of anorexia on social media

Comunicació presentada a: INSCI 2018 celebrada del 24 al 26 d'octubre de 2018 a Sant Petersburg, Rússia.This paper proposes an approach for the early detection of anorexia nervosa (AN) on social media. We present a machine learning approach that processes the texts written by social media users. This method relies on a set of features based on domain-specific vocabulary, topics, psychological processes, and linguistic information extracted from the users’ writings. This approach penalizes the delay in detecting positive cases in order to classify the users in risk as early as possible. Identifying anorexia early, along with an appropriate treatment, improves the speed of recovery and the likelihood of staying free of the illness. The results of this work showed that our proposal is suitable for the early detection of AN symptoms.This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the Maria de Maeztu Units of Excellence Programme (MDM-2015-0502)