OPBench: A Graph Benchmark to Combat the Opioid Crisis

TL;DR

OPBench is a comprehensive graph benchmark designed to evaluate graph learning methods across multiple real-world opioid crisis scenarios, aiding the development of computational solutions to this urgent public health issue.

Contribution

This paper introduces OPBench, the first systematic benchmark with diverse datasets, evaluation protocols, and baselines for modeling opioid-related phenomena using graph learning.

Findings

Existing methods have varying strengths and limitations.

The benchmark facilitates fair comparison of graph learning techniques.

Insights guide future research in opioid crisis modeling.

Abstract

The opioid epidemic continues to ravage communities worldwide, straining healthcare systems, disrupting families, and demanding urgent computational solutions. To combat this lethal opioid crisis, graph learning methods have emerged as a promising paradigm for modeling complex drug-related phenomena. However, a significant gap remains: there is no comprehensive benchmark for systematically evaluating these methods across real-world opioid crisis scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce OPBench, the first comprehensive opioid benchmark comprising five datasets across three critical application domains: opioid overdose detection from healthcare claims, illicit drug trafficking detection from digital platforms, and drug misuse prediction from dietary patterns. Specifically, OPBench incorporates diverse graph structures, including heterogeneous graphs and hypergraphs, to preserve the rich and complex relational information among drug-related data. To address data scarcity, we collaborate with domain experts and authoritative institutions to curate and annotate datasets while adhering to privacy and ethical guidelines. Furthermore, we establish a unified evaluation framework with standardized protocols, predefined data splits, and reproducible baselines to facilitate fair and systematic comparison among graph learning methods. Through extensive experiments, we analyze the strengths and limitations of existing graph learning methods, thereby providing actionable insights for future research in combating the opioid crisis. Our source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/Tianyi-Billy-Ma/OPBench.