Social media for opioid addiction epidemiology: Automatic detection of opioid addicts from Twitter and case studies

Opioid (e.g., heroin and morphine) addiction has become one of the largest and deadliest epidemics in the United States. To combat such deadly epidemic, there is an urgent need for novel tools and methodologies to gain new insights into the behavioral processes of opioid abuse and addiction. The role of social media in biomedical knowledge mining has turned into increasingly significant in recent years. In this paper, we propose a novel framework named AutoDOA to automatically detect the opioid addicts from Twitter, which can potentially assist in sharpening our understanding toward the behavioral process of opioid abuse and addiction. In AutoDOA, to model the users and posted tweets as well as their rich relationships, a structured heterogeneous information network (HIN) is first constructed. Then meta-path based approach is used to formulate similarity measures over users and different similarities are aggregated using Laplacian scores. Based on HIN and the combined meta-path, to reduce the cost of acquiring labeled examples for supervised learning, a transductive classification model is built for automatic opioid addict detection. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to apply transductive classification in HIN into drug-addiction domain. Comprehensive experiments on real sample collections from Twitter are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our developed system AutoDOA in opioid addict detection by comparisons with other alternate methods. The results and case studies also demonstrate that knowledge from daily-life social media data mining could support a better practice of opioid addiction prevention and treatment.