What are the three steps to feature elimination?
reduced the dataset by eliminating features, apply feature selection to select highest ranked features to train and test the model and rank the performance of incrementally adding features.
The utility of Twitter data as a medium to support population-level mental health monitoring is not well understood. In an effort to better understand the predictive power of supervised machine learning classifiers and the influence of feature sets for efficiently classifying depression-related tweets on a large-scale, we conducted two feature study experiments. In the first experiment, we assessed the contribution of feature groups such as lexical information (e.g., unigrams) and emotions (e.g., strongly negative) using a feature ablation study. In the second experiment, we determined the percentile of top ranked features that produced the optimal classification performance by applying a three-step feature elimination approach. In the first experiment, we observed that lexical features are critical for identifying depressive symptoms, specifically for depressed mood (-35 points) and for disturbed sleep (-43 points). In the second experiment, we observed that the optimal F1-score performance of top ranked features in percentiles variably ranged across classes e.g., fatigue or loss of energy (5th percentile, 288 features) to depressed mood (55th percentile, 3,168 features) suggesting there is no consistent count of features for predicting depressive-related tweets. We conclude that simple lexical features and reduced feature sets can produce comparable results to larger feature sets.
In recent years, there has been a movement to leverage social medial data to detect, estimate, and track the change in prevalence of disease. For example, eating disorders in Spanish language Twitter tweets BIBREF0 and influenza surveillance BIBREF1 . More recently, social media has been leveraged to monitor social risks such as prescription drug and smoking behaviors BIBREF2 , BIBREF3 , BIBREF4 as well as a variety of mental health disorders including suicidal ideation BIBREF5 , attention deficient hyperactivity disorder BIBREF6 and major depressive disorder BIBREF7 . In the case of major depressive disorder, recent efforts range from characterizing linguistic phenomena associated with depression BIBREF8 and its subtypes e.g., postpartum depression BIBREF5 , to identifying specific depressive symptoms BIBREF9 , BIBREF10 e.g., depressed mood. However, more research is needed to better understand the predictive power of supervised machine learning classifiers and the influence of feature groups and feature sets for efficiently classifying depression-related tweets to support mental health monitoring at the population-level BIBREF11 . This paper builds upon related works toward classifying Twitter tweets representing symptoms of major depressive disorder by assessing the contribution of lexical features (e.g., unigrams) and emotion (e.g., strongly negative) to classification performance, and by applying methods to eliminate low-value features.