Text Mining Self-Disclosing Health Information for Public Health Service

Understanding specific patterns or knowledge of self-disclosing health information could support public health surveillance and healthcare. This study aimed to develop an analytical framework to identify self-disclosing health information with unusual messages on web forums by leveraging advanced text-mining techniques. To demonstrate the performance of the proposed analytical framework, we conducted an experimental study on 2 major human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) forums in Taiwan. The experimental results show that the classification accuracy increased significantly (up to 83.83%) when using features selected by the information gain technique. The results also show the importance of adopting domain-specific features in analyzing unusual messages on web forums. This study has practical implications for the prevention and support of HIV/AIDS healthcare. For example, public health agencies can re-allocate resources and deliver services to people who need help via social media sites. In addition, individuals can also join a social media site to get better suggestions and support from each other.