Exploring Hybrid and Ensemble Models for Multiclass Prediction of Mental Health Status on Social Media

TL;DR

This paper investigates the use of hybrid and ensemble machine learning models, combining transformer-based and neural network architectures, to classify six mental health conditions from Reddit social media posts, emphasizing feature importance.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach using hybrid and ensemble models with diverse linguistic features for multiclass mental health prediction from social media data.

Findings

Transformer-based models outperform traditional methods.

Feature ablation reveals key indicators for each condition.

Ensemble models improve classification accuracy.

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in research on automatic mental health detection (MHD) from social media data leveraging advances in natural language processing and machine learning techniques. While significant progress has been achieved in this interdisciplinary research area, the vast majority of work has treated MHD as a binary classification task. The multiclass classification setup is, however, essential if we are to uncover the subtle differences among the statistical patterns of language use associated with particular mental health conditions. Here, we report on experiments aimed at predicting six conditions (anxiety, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and psychological stress) from Reddit social media posts. We explore and compare the performance of hybrid and ensemble models leveraging transformer-based architectures (BERT and RoBERTa) and BiLSTM neural networks trained on within-text distributions of a diverse set of linguistic features. This set encompasses measures of syntactic complexity, lexical sophistication and diversity, readability, and register-specific ngram frequencies, as well as sentiment and emotion lexicons. In addition, we conduct feature ablation experiments to investigate which types of features are most indicative of particular mental health conditions.