7 ms·
A machine learning approach to identifying thought markers of suicidal subjects
- kristopolous 10y agoI'd love to take this test. I don't really know the answer to if I am or not. For instance, since everyone dies, I'd certainly like to die in a fantastic and wonderfully improbable way. Or if a doctor told me I was going to die soon, I'd accept it and start doing really irresponsible and dangerous things... I wouldn't be like "oh dearest me, I must clasp on to life longer." Is that suicidal?
- titzer 10y agoNo.
- costcopizza 10y agoNot even close to suicidal.
- lordnacho 10y agoAnd how accurate are traditional methods? Seems to be behind a paywall. Exciting, whatever the answer is. It's awful when someone commits suicide, and if there's some automated way to test it, that would help a lot. Also less intrusive. Who knows how many people need help but are too shy to reach out.
- sudhirj 10y agoThis is also one of those perfect applications where it's quite okay to have a false positive.
- fennecfoxen 10y agoIs it really? Everyone, sudhirj is suicidal! Please contact everyone who knows him and ask them to reach out. I'm sure this is not going to damage his or her interpersonal relationships or career prospects at all.
- belovedeagle 10y agoHoly , you can see why I wrote my top-level comment. Even here people are already jumping on the "who cares if it's accurate, take away their freedom and their dignity at the first sign of trouble!" bandwagon.
- DINKDINK 10y ago"Hi this is an automated message from Facebook alerting you that the police have been called to your husband's/friends/boss's location to prevent him from killing himself" "Actually just kidding, we had a little SNAFU. Thank you for being a loyal Facebook user, we assume this had a neutral effect on your life"
- aub3bhat 10y agoActually Instagram does send a message to the user if enough people mark the user in danger of being harmed. Similar with Google where if someone searches for methods of committing suicide the user will get a number for helpline as first result in bold letter. https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/19/instagram-tackles-self-harm-and-suicide-with-new-reporting-tools-support-options/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/19/instagram-tackles-self-har...
- Scarblac 10y agoI don't know, the first application I can think of is raising life insurance fees for people who may be suicidal.
- belovedeagle 10y agoGreat, now society has an excuse to put scary people away with essentially no due process thanks to the magical label of "suicidal". For those living with mental illness, reasons to despair of safety and fair treatment are up, up, up. Seeking help will never have seemed so dangerous.
- hga 10y agoGreat, now society has an excuse to put scary people away with essentially no due process thanks to the magical label of "suicidal". Only saving grace is that in the US since the '60s-'70s we've been too cheap and too "enlightened" to do this unless the threat is truly dire. I wouldn't worry about it here, although all responsible mental health workers will during a visit ask you about suicide issues and I assume you should answer truthfully (weasel word since I've never been suicidal). As for needing an excuse, many examples like the Soviet one show no real excuse is needed for true persecution.
- 0xcde4c3db 10y agoNot to mention that even if you're admitted voluntarily, you aren't necessarily allowed to leave when you want, even beyond the oft-quoted 72-hour hold. Legally you might be entitled to leave, but the facility can basically force you to stay by denying the resources needed to fill out the discharge paperwork.
- DINKDINK 10y agoA discussed version of the paper[1] says: >A new study shows that computer technology known as machine learning is up to 93 percent accurate in correctly classifying a suicidal person P(+|suicidal) = .93 I want to know P(suicidal|+) [2] [1]http://neurosciencenews.com/suicide-machine-learning-5448/ http://neurosciencenews.com/suicide-machine-learning-5448/ [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes%27_theorem#Drug_testing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes%27_theorem#Drug_testing
- kixiQu 10y agoThe linked article contains exactly this information, though. Figure 1 showed the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve, which they called something else, but it's the standard way of discussing this. It plots the classifier's true positive rate versus the false positive rate at various settings thusly: the y-axis plots the "sensitivity", which is the true positive rate. The x-axis plots the "specificity", which is equal to (1 - false positive rate)... but because everyone is thinking of the false positive rate anyway, you'll notice that the specificity goes from 1 to 0. Incidentally, these are plotted as a curve because it's trivial to build a classifier with a 100% true positive rate (call them all suicidal) or a 0% false positive rate (call none of them suicidal), but just how "good" your model / algorithm is is a function of how it performs with both.
- d--b 10y agoYes! That is what is scary as fuck with these "magic classification" techniques. The more reliable they are, the more people dismiss false positives. This, applied to criminality is totally 1984.
- koube 10y agoFor those that don't know, "this applied to criminality" already exists and has some problems. Propublica wrote a story criticizing it's use: https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessm... The company responded with a rebuttal: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2998391-ProPublica-Commentary-Final-070616.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2998391-ProPublica-C... And Propublica has a counter-rebuttal: https://www.propublica.org/article/propublica-responds-to-companys-critique-of-machine-bias-story https://www.propublica.org/article/propublica-responds-to-co...
- rocqua 10y agoThat 85% 'accuracy' is ambiguous. I couldn't get into the article, but if that number includes false positives, that's not really practical. Suicide is really rare, so it could just be that it picks a 15% of the population that includes al suicidal people. That means the vast majority of those positives are false positives. Basically, its the precision and recall that matters.
- rawnlq 10y agoI think machine learning people use a combination (specifically the harmonic mean) of both when evaluating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F1_score https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F1_score
- dx034 10y agoThey should use it, but articles often drop that (or similar) numbers. It's easy to get headlines if you report 85% accuracy as it sounds good and is easy to understand. Reporting the proper numbers is harder to understand for people who are not working in the field and you'd quickly discover that the model doesn't actually work.
- denzil_correa 10y agoI'm not even sure why people report ONLY accuracy as an evaluation metric. It means nothing - appropriately weighted F scores, precision, recall give more insight into the system.
- dasboth 10y agoCompletely agree. Although if your binary classes are perfectly balanced then accuracy is a valid metric, but that's rarely the case. I guess the problem is that an ROC curve wouldn't create flashy headlines.
- denzil_correa 10y ago> I guess the problem is that an ROC curve wouldn't create flashy headlines. You can, you just need to put in a little bit of work. We don't need to specify the exact accuracy in the title.
- ClassyJacket 10y agoWhat do you test against to see if someone is indeed suicidal? Self reporting, or do you wait around till they die and see if it was due to suicide or something else?
- conjectures 10y agoThink they're just looking at self reporting. Otherwise n=400 gonna be small.
- Scarblac 10y agoYou send them a suicide pill and see who takes it. Just kidding, that wouldn't be scientific. Half of the pills are actually placebos.
- thinkMOAR 10y ago"classify 379 subjects recruited from two academic medical centers and a rural community hospital" So they recruit people from hospitals and check if they ever thought about suicide/self death? Hmm okay nice test group.... Everybody, healthy or not healthy, in life will think about how it would be or how they would end themselves, it's human nature. Though people in hospitals, potentially sick, generally older, for sure will have had those thoughts, because they often had issues that makes them lets say less enthusiastic about life?
- thret 10y agoSurely it is more normal to fantasize about a Tom Sawyer funeral than actual suicide? How it would be/how to do it - completely different thought processes.
- thinkMOAR 10y agoI don't know, i'm no expert, and certainly not a judge of what is normal and what is not. I do know that 'normal' isn't the same for everybody. But if you get a serious event in life (example, death of family member or other loved one), that makes you doubt if you still enjoy life or whats the use of 'finishing' it till your body gives up.. those thoughts will occur, sometimes swiftly sometimes occupying your brain for longer. Do keep in mind, having thoughts and actually acting upon those thoughts are two different things. Though pondering if tom sawyer has brass handles on his coffin.... Maybe if i was reading tom sawyer, yes that would probably be a thought that came before others. :) Have to admit, i never read that book, so not entirely sure why one would fantasise about his funeral.
- colomon 10y agoTom Sawyer is sitting in the rafters watching his own funeral. There's more than one sequel, and he survives all of them.
- DanBC 10y agoI guess that people doing research into suicidal ideation know that it comes in different forms - from well defined plans with means and method available, to abstract thoughts of "things would be better if I wasn't here", and that they will have taken different forms if ideation into account when preparing the research.
- aub3bhat 10y agoThis is subject specific journal reporting a "machine learning" study with just ~400 odd patients dataset. I would not take these results seriously. The accuracy number cited is meaningless, and other than being a bullet point on someone's CV it does not have much of a value. 85% Accuracy or 0.8 AUC score is pointless, unless compared with current state of art e.g. having psychologist give an opinion and comparing against the correct population, e.g. all patients who get interviewed as opposed to a balanced set.
- jonplackett 10y agoSo does this mean it misses 14 suicidal people for every one it finds. Or that it classifies 14 people suicidal who aren't for each one it finds? Not super great either way!
- truth_sentinell 10y agoIf it is what it claims, it's probably better than any human
- denzil_correa 10y agoIs it?
- DanBC 10y agoSuicide risk assessments are mostly worthless. They're done because you need to show you've done something to try to identify people at risk of suicide and to have tried to prevent that death.
- B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago"The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night." -- Friedrich Nietzsche (Not exactly the most balanced bike in the shed, but some people like it that way ...)
- aangjie 10y agoI second this.. The idea that there's an escape route is a relief, when you look at a big problem(that you have to solve) and your brain panics(it definitely puts the problem in perspective). However, i'm still divided as if having this is a good habit for self-growth or just an excuse to ignore the problem and work around it.
- pessimizer 10y agoIt might be healthier to not hold on to suicide as a last escape from failure, and just accept the possibility of life after failure. The thought process that you're illustrating here seems like part of what's driving family annihilators: the fathers who would rather kill you than fail you.
- w_t_payne 10y agoSuicide is a very serious health issue that affects an astonishing number of people worldwide. Any advance that helps detection and treatment is to be welcomed.
- nl 10y agoBased on [1], I think I can build a model that outperforms this: return False [1] "An estimated 9.3 million adults (3.9% of the adult U.S. population) reported having suicidal thoughts in the past year." https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/suicide-datasheet-a.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/suicide-datasheet...
- didgeoridoo 10y agoBut the patient pool was drawn largely from psych units, where your (very efficient!) classifier might not work as well. The real headline should probably be "identifying suicidality in patients already admitted to psychiatric institutions".
- delegate 10y agoSuicide is a big taboo in the 'western' christian society, but there are (and have been) lots of cultures were suicide is looked at differently - as something honorable, good, etc. Even our culture has different interpretations for it - eg suicide vs sacrifice. We morally condemn the former but elate the latter, even though the outcome is the same - a person dies. Metaphysically, the meaning of suicide is given by the perceived meaning of death and the [lack of] belief in some sort of afterlife. Is it a sin or not ? If there's an afterlife, will you be punished for committing suicide? What about the loved ones ? They will judge.. But for example, if you knew that this life is actually a realistic VR simulation that you've entered into, then suicide would be perceived as a sort of 'ESC' key - a way out of the simulation. Like exiting a game. If a person's circumstance in life is such that the person is bound to suffer until death (eg. disease, mutilation or loss of everyone), then suicide might be looked at as a sort of release - a good thing.. There's the whole controversy regarding assisted suicide.. Then there's the sacrifice - going into battle screaming is a form of attempted suicide combined with attempted murder. At the end of the day, the battlefield participants are eventually split into killers and those who committed suicide. From this perspective, going to war is collective [attempted] suicide. War is a form of temporarily suspending the moral rules we obey by (do not kill others or self) and people gladly participate in both killing others and themselves. I guess my point is that tfa is looking at a very narrow spectrum of 'suicidal people' - suicide is a lot more prevalent than that and it's practiced not just by people with mental illness..
- Chris2048 10y ago> suicide is a lot more prevalent than If you are talking about war, then no, that's not suicide. The aim is not to die, even though it might be likely. Even suicide bombers don't have death as their primary aim - if they achieve the same result without dying, they would.
- webmaven 10y ago> Even suicide bombers don't have death as their primary aim - if they achieve the same result without dying, they would." That depends on how you define "the same result". The assumed (in some cultures) moral superiority of the suicide bomber regardless of the legitimacy of the target can have considerable PR value. In a way that somewhat resembles a ponzi scheme, those at the very top may reap higher rewards, and so choose to elevate the tactic into a strategy.
- staticelf 10y agoMy friend was suicidal and we tried to get help from the authorities but got none. None at all. He later committed suicide for real and this makes me wonder why it matters to discover it if you're not even helping people that is asking for it?
- vinay427 10y agoI don't understand your viewpoint. This work isn't being done by your local authorities and isn't an alternative action to their providing help. It provides clear potential benefits (if it performs as well as implied) for numerous people at risk in the world, which is a substantial goal that can be at least be applied in places that do have better forms of assistance. Perhaps if your local authorities do eventually implement better protocols, this will be of use for future suicidal residents there as well. I understand that you're trying to raise awareness for the lack of help from authorities, but it seems awfully dismissive of work that seemingly has nothing to do with the first problem.
- chestervonwinch 10y agoFrom Figure 1 (which illustrates some ROC curves): > The gray line is the AROC curve for a baseline (random) classifier The AROC is the area under the ROC curve, not the curve itself. Also, the scale on Figure 1 for the x-axis (corresponding to the False Positive Rate, or sensitivity) go above zero and below one, which doesn't make any sense.
- oelmekki 10y agoI can appreciate the effort made in the research, but classifying possible human behaviors is exactly a field where I don't want machine learning to go. There is behind machine learning both a phantasm - artificial intelligences that can guess what humans can't - and a reality - it's just statistical models that are never 100% accurate because, well, that's an attribute of statistics. Those two elements combined and applied to behavior classification sounds like a scary thing, not unlike the kind of errors eugenics made, over trusting their science to apply it on social facts, totally discarding empathy and individual context.
- amelius 10y ago> classifying possible human behaviors is exactly a field where I don't want machine learning to go Advertisers are already doing this on a massive scale.
- oelmekki 10y agoIf they make an error, it's their own problem, so I'm fine with that. I'm more concerned about researching such models to decide policies or act upon as administratives. I don't think classifying suicidal behavior is something most advertisers are interested about :)
- adrianN 10y agoThe content you're presented with on the net is more and more controlled by algorithms. They provide you with stuff they think you'll like. This has an influence on your opinions. On a large enough scale this can very much influence policies and societal developments.
- wu-ikkyu 10y ago>I don't think classifying suicidal behavior is something most advertisers are interested about :) Facebook has shown an interest in manipulating depressive states of it's users. http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full.pdf http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full.pdf
- 10y ago
- sslayer 10y agoThought conformity at our doorsteps.