Patterns of Routes of Administration and Drug Tampering for Nonmedical Opioid Consumption: Data Mining and Content Analysis of Reddit Discussions

The complex unfolding of the US opioid epidemic in the last 20 years has been the subject of a large body of medical and pharmacological research, and it has sparked a multidisciplinary discussion on how to implement interventions and policies to effectively control its impact on public health. This study leverages Reddit as the primary data source to investigate the opioid crisis. We aimed to find a large cohort of Reddit users interested in discussing the use of opioids, trace the temporal evolution of their interest, and extensively characterize patterns of the nonmedical consumption of opioids, with a focus on routes of administration and drug tampering. We used a semiautomatic information retrieval algorithm to identify subreddits discussing nonmedical opioid consumption, finding over 86,000 Reddit users potentially involved in firsthand opioid usage. We developed a methodology based on word embedding to select alternative colloquial and nonmedical terms referring to opioid substances, routes of administration, and drug-tampering methods. We modeled the preferences of adoption of substances and routes of administration, estimating their prevalence and temporal unfolding, observing relevant trends such as the surge in synthetic opioids like fentanyl and an increasing interest in rectal administration. Ultimately, through the evaluation of odds ratios based on co-mentions, we measured the strength of association between opioid substances, routes of administration, and drug tampering, finding evidence of understudied abusive behaviors like chewing fentanyl patches and dissolving buprenorphine sublingually. We believe that our approach may provide a novel perspective for a more comprehensive understanding of nonmedical abuse of opioids substances and inform the prevention, treatment, and control of the public health effects

Stock Prediction Based on Social Media Data via Sentiment Analysis: a Study on Reddit

With the development of internet and information technology, online text data has become available and accessible for research in many fields including stock prediction. Social media, being one of the biggest content generators on the internet, is a great data resource for text mining and stock prediction. It has a large capacity, high data density, and fast information spread. In this thesis, analyses on the relationship between the stock-related text in social media (Reddit) and the price changes of corresponding stocks are implemented. In the analysis, sentiment analysis is first applied to extract the individual users’ emotions and opinions about the stocks. After that, the extracted features are analyzed via descriptive statistics and predictive analysis using the Pearson correlation coefficient and machine learning models. The predictive analysis is designed to examine the dependence between the social media text data and stock price change by evaluating the performance of predictions, four indicators are used in the evaluation including “prediction accuracy on price change direction” and three indicators in simulated algorithm trading experiments based on prediction results. They are “total profit with trading strategy for single stock”, “daily profit efficiency of trading strategy” and “total profit with Portfolio trading strategy”. From the results and the comparison with a Buy and Hold (B&H) baseline strategy, the predictions show good results in terms of “daily profit efficiency” and “total profit with Portfolio trading strategy”. Therefore, the online forum text from Reddit are proved to be correlated with future stock price changes and might be used to make more profit than B&H strategy by incorporating their information in portfolio trading strategies