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Background As Twitter has become an active data source for health surveillance research, it is important that efficient and effective methods are developed to identify tweets related to personal health experience. Conventional classification algorithms rely on features engineered by human domain experts, and engineering such features is a challenging task and requires much human intelligence. The resultant features may not be optimal for the classification problem, and can make it challenging for conventional classifiers to correctly predict personal experience tweets (PETs) due to the various ways to express and/or describe personal experience in tweets. In this study, we developed a method that combines word embedding and long short-term memory (LSTM) model without the need to engineer any specific features. Through word embedding, tweet texts were represented as dense vectors which in turn were fed to the LSTM neural network as sequences. Results Statistical analyses of the results of 10-fold cross-validations of our method and conventional methods indicate that there exist significant differences (p

Twitter, as a social media platform, has become an increasingly useful data source for health surveillance studies, and personal health experiences shared on Twitter provide valuable information to the surveillance. Twitter data are known for their irregular usages of languages and informal short texts due to the 140 character limit, and for their noisiness such that majority of the posts are irrelevant to any particular health surveillance. These factors pose challenges in identifying personal health experience tweets from the Twitter data. In this study, we designed deep neural networks with 3 different architectural configurations, and after training them with a corpus of 8,770 annotated tweets, we used them to predict personal experience tweets from a set of 821 annotate tweets. Our results demonstrated a significant amount of improvement in predicting personal health experience tweets by deep neural networks over that by conventional classifiers: 37.5% in accuracy, 31.1% in precision, and 53.6% in recall. We believe that our method can be utilized in various health surveillance studies using Twitter as a data source.

Studies have shown that Twitter can be used for health surveillance, and personal experience tweets (PETs) are an important source of information for health surveillance. To mine Twitter data requires a relatively balanced corpus and it is challenging to construct such a corpus due to the labor-intensive annotation tasks of large data sets. We developed a bootstrap method of finding PETs with the use of the machine learning-based filter. Through a few iterations, our approach can efficiently improve the balance of two class dataset with a reduced amount of annotation work. To demonstrate the usefulness of our method, a PET corpus related to effects caused by 4 dietary supplements was constructed. In 3 iterations, a corpus of 8,770 tweets was obtained from 108,528 tweets collected, and the imbalance of two classes was significantly reduced from 1:31 to 1:3. In addition, two out of three classifiers used showed improved performance over iterations. It is conceivable that our approach can be applied to various other health surveillance studies that use machine learning-based classifications of imbalanced Twitter data.