Detecting and Measuring Depression on Social Media Using a Machine Learning Approach: Systematic Review

BACKGROUND: Detection of depression gained prominence soon after this troublesome disease emerged as a serious public health concern worldwide. OBJECTIVE: This systematic review aims to summarize the findings of previous studies concerning applying machine learning (ML) methods to text data from social media to detect depressive symptoms and to suggest directions for future research in this area. METHODS: A bibliographic search was conducted for the period of January 1990 to December 2020 in Google Scholar, PubMed, Medline, ERIC, PsycINFO, and BioMed. Two reviewers retrieved and independently assessed the 418 studies consisting of 322 articles identified through database searching and 96 articles identified through other sources; 17 of the studies met the criteria for inclusion. RESULTS: Of the 17 studies, 10 had identified depression based on researcher-inferred mental status, 5 had identified it based on users’ own descriptions of their mental status, and 2 were identified based on community membership. The ML approaches of 13 of the 17 studies were supervised learning approaches, while 3 used unsupervised learning approaches; the remaining 1 study did not describe its ML approach. Challenges in areas such as sampling, optimization of approaches to prediction and their features, generalizability, privacy, and other ethical issues call for further research. CONCLUSIONS: ML approaches applied to text data from users on social media can work effectively in depression detection and could serve as complementary tools in public mental health practice.