CoML: Machine Learning based approach for COVID-19 related Suicidal Ideation detection

The pervasive use of online social media platforms has changed the communication habits and subsequently the content and the frequency of the human exchanges. People share their thoughts on social media more frequently and freely. In particular and due to the societal stigma, people find less obstacle to discuss mental health problems on social media compared to face-o-face discussion. Mining social media for the sake of analysing suicidal intention is an attractive and at the same time challenging task especially during COVID-19 era. The main objective is to leverage machine learning to classify the social media user suicidal behavior while considering the impact of COVID-19 circumstances. We propose a rigorous feature engineering technique based on TF/IDF and Bag of Words. Machine learning classifiers and ensemble models are compared to find that the Neural Network(NN) classifier outperforms the benchmarks with a precision of 94%, a Recall of 94%, an F1 Score of 94% , and an overall accuracy of 94%. In the future, more feature selection techniques and deep learning can be used.