Concept drift vs suicide: How one can help prevent the other?

Overview & Synopsis

Suicide has long been a troublesome problem for society and is an event that has far-reaching consequences. Health organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the French National Observatory of Suicide (ONS) have pledged to reduce the number of suicides by 10% in all countries by 2020. While suicide is a very marked event, there are often behaviours and words that can act as early signs of predisposition to suicide. The objective of this application is to develop a system that semi-automatically detects these markers through social networks. A previous work has proposed the classification of Tweets using vocabulary in topics related to suicide: sadness, psychological injuries, mental state, depression, fear, loneliness, proposed suicide method, anorexia, insults , and cyber bullying. During that training period, we added a new dimension, time to reflect changes in the status of monitored people. We implemented it with different learning methods including an original concept drift method. We have successfully used this method on synthetic and real data sets issued from the Facebook platform.