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Social media recently became convenient platforms for different groups with common concerns to share their experiences, including Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs). In this paper, we propose a two stage intelligent algorithm which we call "Simi_to_Prob", that utilizes social media forums; for ranking ADRs, and evaluating the ADRs prevalence considering different age and gender groups as its first stage. In the second stage, ADRs are predicted utilizing a different data set from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In particular, Natural Language Processing (NLP) is used on social media to extract ranked lists of ADRs, which are then validated using novel intrinsic evaluation methods. In the second stage, feature engineering is used to extend the input feature space, then a two stage supervised machine learning method is used to predict future ADRs incidences. Our results show correct ranked list of ADRs for three antihypertensive drugs, where high Spearman's rank correlation coefficients (rs) of of 0.7458, 0.6678 and 0.5929 were obtained between SIDER database for drug ADRs, and our obtained lists from social media. Furthermore, Relatedness between ADRs and age and gender groups achieved high area under the ROC curve (AUC) reaching 0.959. The second stage results showed high AUCs of 0.96 and 0.99 for the prediction of future ADRs probabilities. The proposed algorithm shows that mining social media can provide reliable source of information, and additional features that can be used to boost supervised machine learning methods' performance in different domains including Pharmacovigilance research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As we see the growing social media transparency, where users want to express their opinions we also see a growing need of Sentiment analysis (SA) or Opinion mining. Sentiment Analysis is a process used to interpret user sentiments related to a specific topic. It is a field of study which is formed at the junction of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine learning (ML) and Information retrieval (IR). In this paper we will see various types of machine learning (ML) techniques that come under supervised learning. We will be discussing 3 techniques under the domain of Supervised ML, namely, SVM, Naive Bayes and Maximum Entropy, which are studied and established to be the most accurate. We will see how supervised ML techniques can be applied in Image processing and Remote sensing as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The widespread influence of social media impacts every aspect of life, including the healthcare sector. Although medics and health professionals are the final decision makers, the advice and recommendations obtained from fellow patients are significant. In this context, the present paper explores the topics of discussion posted by breast cancer patients and survivors on online forums. The study examines an online forum, Breastcancer.org, maps the discussion entries to several topics, and proposes a machine learning model based on a classification algorithm to characterize the topics. To explore the topics of breast cancer patients and survivors, approximately 1000 posts are selected and manually labeled with annotations. In contrast, millions of posts are available to build the labels. A semi-supervised learning technique is used to build the labels for the unlabeled data; hence, the large data are classified using a deep learning algorithm. The deep learning algorithm BiLSTM with BERT word embedding technique provided a better f1-score of 79.5%. This method is able to classify the following topics: medication reviews, clinician knowledge, various treatment options, seeking and providing support, diagnostic procedures, financial issues and implications for everyday life. What matters the most for the patients is coping with everyday living as well as seeking and providing emotional and informational support. The approach and findings show the potential of studying social media to provide insight into patients' experiences with cancer like critical health problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder that ranks among the leading causes of disability worldwide. However, many cases of schizophrenia remain untreated due to failure to diagnose, self-denial, and social stigma. With the advent of social media, individuals suffering from schizophrenia share their mental health problems and seek support and treatment options. Machine learning approaches are increasingly used for detecting schizophrenia from social media posts. This study aims to determine whether machine learning could be effectively used to detect signs of schizophrenia in social media users by analyzing their social media texts. To this end, we collected posts from the social media platform Reddit focusing on schizophrenia, along with non-mental health related posts (fitness, jokes, meditation, parenting, relationships, and teaching) for the control group. We extracted linguistic features and content topics from the posts. Using supervised machine learning, we classified posts belonging to schizophrenia and interpreted important features to identify linguistic markers of schizophrenia. We applied unsupervised clustering to the features to uncover a coherent semantic representation of words in schizophrenia. We identified significant differences in linguistic features and topics including increased use of third person plural pronouns and negative emotion words and symptom-related topics. We distinguished schizophrenic from control posts with an accuracy of 96%. Finally, we found that coherent semantic groups of words were the key to detecting schizophrenia. Our findings suggest that machine learning approaches could help us understand the linguistic characteristics of schizophrenia and identify schizophrenia or otherwise at-risk individuals using social media texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19 is a global health emergency that has fundamentally altered human life. Public perception about COVID-19 greatly informs public policymaking and charts the course of present and future mitigation strategies. Existing approaches to gain insights into the evolving nature of public opinion has led to the application of natural language processing on public interaction data acquired from online surveys and social media. In this work, we apply supervised and unsupervised machine learning approaches on global Twitter data to learn the opinions about adoption of mitigation strategies such as social distancing, masks, and vaccination, as well as the effect of socioeconomic, demographic, political, and epidemiological features on perceptions. Our study reveals the uniform polarity in public sentiment on the basis of spatial proximity or COVID-19 infection rates. We show the reservation about the adoption of social distancing and vaccination across the world and also quantify the influence of airport traffic, homelessness, followed by old age and race on sentiment of netizens within the US. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]