Early detection of eating disorders in reddit

Mayans Yern, Marc

Early detection of eating disorders in reddit

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Citation

Mayans Yern, M. Early detection of eating disorders in reddit. 2018. handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10230/35695

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Abstract

This thesis proposes an approach for the early detection of Anorexia Nervosa (AN) on social media. Our method is based on machine learning techniques using the processed texts written by social media users. This method relies on a set of features based on domain-specific vocabulary, topic modelling, psychological processes and linguistic information extracted from the users’ writings. Moreover, other features are studied in order to exploit all the dataset resources. Additionally, we have compared some of the most known learning algorithms and we have introduced a minimum amount of information threshold to avoid some false positive predictions. This approach penalises the delay in the detection of positive cases in order to classify the users at risk as early as possible. By the early identification of anorexia, along with an appropriate treatment, the speed of recovery and the likelihood of staying free of the illness improves. The results of this thesis showed that our proposal is suitable for the early detection of AN symptoms in social media. Further research in this topic is needed to solve the problems stated in this project.