Validating Machine Learning Algorithms for Twitter Data Against Established Measures of Suicidality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: One of the leading causes of death in the United States (US) is suicide and new methods of assessment are needed to track its risk in real time. OBJECTIVE: Our objective is to validate the use of machine learning algorithms for Twitter data against empirically validated measures of suicidality in the US population. METHODS: Using a machine learning algorithm, the Twitter feeds of 135 Mechanical Turk (MTurk) participants were compared with validated, self-report measures of suicide risk. RESULTS: Our findings show that people who are at high suicidal risk can be easily differentiated from those who are not by machine learning algorithms, which accurately identify the clinically significant suicidal rate in 92% of cases (sensitivity: 53%, specificity: 97%, positive predictive value: 75%, negative predictive value: 93%). CONCLUSIONS: Machine learning algorithms are efficient in differentiating people who are at a suicidal risk from those who are not. Evidence for suicidality can be measured in nonclinical populations using social media data.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.070 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".