Depression is a major contributor to the overall global burden of diseases. Traditionally, doctors diagnose depressed people face to face via referring to clinical depression criteria. However, more than 70% of the patients would not consult doctors at early stages of depression, which leads to further deterioration of their conditions. Meanwhile, people are increasingly relying on social media to disclose emotions and sharing their daily lives, thus social media have successfully been leveraged for helping detect physical and mental diseases. Inspired by these, our work aims to make timely depression detection via harvesting social media data. We construct well-labeled depression and non-depression dataset on Twitter, and extract six depression-related feature groups covering not only the clinical depression criteria, but also online behaviors on social media. With these feature groups, we propose a multimodal depressive dictionary learning model to detect the depressed users on Twitter. A series of experiments are conducted to validate this model, which outperforms (+3% to +10%) several baselines. Finally, we analyze a large-scale dataset on Twitter to reveal the underlying online behaviors between depressed and non-depressed users.

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Depression detection is a significant issue for human well-being. In previous studies, online detection has proven effective in Twitter, enabling proactive care for depressed users. Owing to cultural differences, replicating the method to other social media platforms, such as Chinese Weibo, however, might lead to poor performance because of insufficient available labeled (self-reported depression) data for model training. In this paper, we study an interesting but challenging problem of enhancing detection in a certain target domain (e.g. Weibo) with ample Twitter data as the source domain. We first systematically analyze the depression-related feature patterns across domains and summarize two major detection challenges, namely isomerism and divergency. We further propose a cross-domain Deep Neural Network model with Feature Adaptive Transformation & Combination strategy (DNN-FATC) that transfers the relevant information across heterogeneous domains. Experiments demonstrate improved performance compared to existing heterogeneous transfer methods or training directly in the target domain (over 3.4% improvement in F1), indicating the potential of our model to enable depression detection via social media for more countries with different cultural settings.

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