Detection of Suicidal Ideation on Twitter using Machine Learning & Ensemble Approaches

Abstract

Suicidal ideation is one of the most severe mental health issues faced by people all over the world. There are various risk factors involved that can lead to suicide. The most common & critical risk factors among them are depression, anxiety, social isolation and hopelessness. Early detection of these risk factors can help in preventing or reducing the number of suicides. Online social networking platforms like Twitter, Redditt and Facebook are becoming a new way for the people to express themselves freely without worrying about social stigma. This paper presents a methodology and experimentation using social media as a tool to analyse the suicidal ideation in a better way, thus helping in preventing the chances of being the victim of this unfortunate mental disorder. The data is collected from Twitter, one of the popular Social Networking Sites (SNS). The Tweets are then pre-processed and annotated manually. Finally, various machine learning and ensemble methods are used to automatically distinguish Suicidal and Non-Suicidal tweets. This experimental study will help the researchers to know and understand how SNS are used by the people to express their distress related feelings and emotions. The study further confirmed that it is possible to analyse and differentiate these tweets using human coding and then replicate the accuracy by machine classification. However, the power of prediction for detecting genuine suicidality is not confirmed yet, and this study does not directly communicate and intervene the people having suicidal behaviour.