Online continuous learning of users suicidal risk on social media

Abstract

Suicide is a tragedy for family and society. With social media becoming an integral part of people’s life nowadays, assessing suicidal risk based on one’s social media behavior has drawn increasing research attentions. The majority of the works trained a machine learning model to classify user’s suicidal risk severity level in a batch learning setting on the entire training data. This is not a timely and scalable solution in the context of social media where new data arrives sequentially in a stream form. In this study, we formulate and address the continuous suicidal risk assessment problem through a three-layered joint memory network, consisting of a short-term personal memory and long-term personal and global memories. Unlike existing methods that rely on static classification, our model supports real-time, continuous learning from users’ emotional and behavioral dynamics without the need for full retraining. This allows for personalized and adaptive risk tracking over time. We also present a way to continuously capture users’ personal features and integrate them in suicidal risk assessment. The performance on the constructed dataset containing 95 suicidal and 95 non-suicidal social media users shows that 96% of accuracy can be achieved with the proposed method.