Abstract
Suicide is one of the most critical public health concerns in the world and the second cause of death among young people in many countries. However, to date, no study can diagnose suicide ideation/behavior among university students in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region using a machine learning approach. Therefore, stability feature selection and stacked ensembled decision trees were employed in this classification problem. A total of 573 university students responded to a battery of questionnaires. Three-fold cross-validation with a variety of performance indices was sued. The proposed diagnostic system had excellent balanced diagnosis accuracy (AUC = 0.90 [CI 95%: 0.86–0.93]) with a high correlation between predicted and observed class labels, fair discriminant power, and excellent class labeling agreement rate. Results showed that 23 items out of all items could accurately diagnose suicide ideation/behavior. These items were psychological problems and how to experience trauma, from the demographic variables, nine items from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Checklist (PCL-5), two items from Post Traumatic Growth (PTG), two items from the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ), six items from the Positive Mental Health (PMH) questionnaire, and one item related to social support. Such features could be used as a screening tool to identify young adults who are at risk of suicide ideation/behavior.
Highlights
According to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) report [1], the rate of death by suicide is close to 800,000 globally
Among the 573 participants, 25% were at high-risk of suicide (SBQ-R ≥ 8)
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study of its kind to make an accurate diagnosis of suicide ideation/behavior using robust ensemble learning in a university student sample in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)
Summary
According to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) report [1], the rate of death by suicide is close to 800,000 globally. As one of the most critical public health concerns, is the second reason for death among young people between the ages of 15 to 29 around the world. This age group in many countries belong to high school and university students. As one of the developing countries located in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, followed the global trend of suicide among university students. Bakhtar and Rezaeian [7] found that the rate of suicide attempts in the Iranian population was between 1.8% to
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