Using deep neural network to identify cancer survivors living with post-traumatic stress disorder on social media

Survivors of cancer are at-risk for the lifelong effects of disease and treatment. A significant number of them face Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) that may adversely affect their mental health. Twitter is a social networking site that allows users to interact with others by posting short messages (tweets). These tweets, which to a certain extent reflect the users psychological state, are convenient for data collection. However, Twitter also contains a mix of noisy and genuine tweets. The process of manually identifying the genuine tweets is expensive and time-consuming. Thus, we stream the data using cancer as a keyword and filter the tweets with cancer-free and PTSD related keywords without having to label each tweet manually. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) learns the representations of the input to identify cancer survivors with PTSD. The experiments on real-world datasets show that the model outperforms the baselines and correctly classifies the new tweets.