Jos Polfliet presented at the Data Innovation Summit on March 30, 2017, discussing the use of text analytics for suicide prevention, highlighting alarming statistics about youth mental health. His project analyzed Canadian tweets to identify correlations between mental health, bullying, and suicidal thoughts, ultimately winning $10,000 for mental health charities. The discussion emphasized the challenges and methodologies in predicting at-risk social media users, leveraging various data sources and analytics techniques.

1. Jos Polfliet
Specialist Data Sciences at SAS Institute - @JosPolfliet
Data Innovation Summit
March, 30 2017
#DIS2017
Suicide prevention using text
analytics

2. can someone with my number please text me because i have nobody to
talk to and i just want to hut myself so badly and i’m scared
my own father told me I deserved being killed. I hate him
there's not one day I don’t think of killing myself

3. Source
Statistics Canada
Canadian Mental Health Association
1 out of 4 teenager deaths
2nd leading cause of death

4. 1.1M tweets
Feelings: 106k ≈ 10%
Bullying: 11k ≈ 1%
Suicide: 382 ≈ 0.035% of tweets
39% correlation between
suicide and bullying

5. Data Impact Challenge
Question 3
What proportion of Canadian youth (13-17) post about their mental health, and
describe experiencing bullying or suicidal thoughts in the past 12 months on social
media?
Our submission
Won $10,000
donated to mental health charities
mind your mind and Rise Asset Development
Canada Health Infoway
$95,000 in awards

6. Download Language Age Topic Analyze
Tweets
in Canada
during a specific
time frame
Detect language
Filter English
Build predictive
model for Age
Filter teenagers
Detect topic
• Aggression
• Alcohol
• Bullying
• Family
• Feelings
• Relationships
• …
Analyze
relationships
between topics
Contextual
analysis of topics
Python crawler for
Twitter API
SAS Text Analytics SAS Enterprise Miner
SAS Text Analytics
SAS Text Analytics SAS Visual Analytics

7. How can we predict “At-Risk”
social media users (for
suicide and self-harm)?

10. Data Science Project Funnel
Idea Define Prove Decide Build Deploy
Data available?
Does this make sense?
Done before?
Input variables?
Target variable?
Expected value?
Is performance as we
expect?
Data Quality?
Offline evaluation
Potential value?
Accuracy measures?
How difficult?
Feasibility?
Data sources
(internal/external)?
Time?
Priority?
Budget?
Executive buy-in?
Business process
redesign?
Architecture
Technical
Performance
Change mgmt.
Resources
Actual value?
Live Evaluation
WE ARE HERE

11. Use your textual data.

12. Call Center Notes Survey Feedback
Online Forums Blogs Consumer Reviews Online News Social Networks
Associate Comments Claims & Case NotesResearch & Publications
Live Chat Factory/Technician Notes HR data Medical/Health Records Contracts & Applications

13. If anybody knows Maggie, let me know! [I’m serious]
@JosPolfliet

14. Jos Polfliet
Specialist Data Sciences at SAS Institute - @JosPolfliet
Data Innovation Summit
March, 30 2017
#DIS2017
Suicide prevention using text
analytics