Online continuous learning of users suicidal risk on social media.

Journal: Artificial intelligence in medicine
Published Date:

Abstract

Suicide is a tragedy for family and society. With social media becoming an integral part of people's life nowadays, assessing suicidal risk based on one's social media behavior has drawn increasing research attentions. The majority of the works trained a machine learning model to classify user's suicidal risk severity level in a batch learning setting on the entire training data. This is not a timely and scalable solution in the context of social media where new data arrives sequentially in a stream form. In this study, we formulate and address the continuous suicidal risk assessment problem through a three-layered joint memory network, consisting of a short-term personal memory and long-term personal and global memories. Unlike existing methods that rely on static classification, our model supports real-time, continuous learning from users' emotional and behavioral dynamics without the need for full retraining. This allows for personalized and adaptive risk tracking over time. We also present a way to continuously capture users' personal features and integrate them in suicidal risk assessment. The performance on the constructed dataset containing 95 suicidal and 95 non-suicidal social media users shows that 96% of accuracy can be achieved with the proposed method.

Authors

  • Lei Cao
    State Key Laboratory of Robotics, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, Liaoning, People's Republic of China. Institutes for Robotics and Intelligent Manufacturing, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, Liaoning, People's Republic of China. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, People's Republic of China.
  • Ling Feng
    Neurobiology Research Unit, Rigshospitalet, Copenhagen, Denmark ling.feng@nru.dk.
  • Yang Ding
    Department of Pediatrics, Sainte-Justine University Hospital and University of Montreal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
  • Huijun Zhang
    Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China.
  • Xin Wang
    Key Laboratory of Bio-based Material Science & Technology (Northeast Forestry University), Ministry of Education, Harbin 150040, China.
  • Kaisheng Zeng
    Department of Neurosurgery, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Nanchang University, Nanchang, Jiangxi 330006, China.
  • Yi Dai
    Department of Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, CA 92617, USA.