Traditional Machine Learning Models and Bidirectional Encoder Representations From Transformer (BERT)-Based Automatic Classification of Tweets About Eating Disorders

Algorithm Development and Validation Study

authored by

Jose Alberto Benítez-Andrades, Jose Manuel Alija-Perez, Maria Esther Vidal, Rafael Pastor-Vargas, María Teresa García-Ordas

Abstract

Background: Eating disorders affect an increasing number of people. Social networks provide information that can help. Objective: We aimed to find machine learning models capable of efficiently categorizing tweets about eating disorders domain. Methods: We collected tweets related to eating disorders, for 3 consecutive months. After preprocessing, a subset of 2000 tweets was labeled: (1) messages written by people suffering from eating disorders or not, (2) messages promoting suffering from eating disorders or not, (3) informative messages or not, and (4) scientific or nonscientific messages. Traditional machine learning and deep learning models were used to classify tweets. We evaluated accuracy, F1 score, and computational time for each model. Results: A total of 1,058,957 tweets related to eating disorders were collected. were obtained in the 4 categorizations, with The bidirectional encoder representations from transformer-based models had the best score among the machine learning and deep learning techniques applied to the 4 categorization tasks (F1 scores 71.1%-86.4%). Conclusions: Bidirectional encoder representations from transformer-based models have better performance, although their computational cost is significantly higher than those of traditional techniques, in classifying eating disorder-related tweets.

Organisation(s)

L3S Research Centre

External Organisation(s)

Universidad de Leon
Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia

Type

Article

Journal

JMIR Medical Informatics

Volume

10

No. of pages

13

Publication date

01.02.2022

Publication status

Published

Peer reviewed

Yes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Health Informatics, Health Information Management

Sustainable Development Goals

SDG 3 - Good Health and Well-being

Electronic version(s)

https://doi.org/10.2196/34492 (Access: Open)