Risk prediction of pathological gambling on social media

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of risk prediction on social media data, specifically focusing on the classification of Reddit users as having a pathological gambling disorder. To tackle this problem, this paper focuses on incorporating temporal and emotional features into the model. The preprocessing phase involves dealing with the time irregularity of posts by padding sequences. Two baseline architectures are used for preliminary evaluation: BERT classifier on concatenated posts per user and GRU with LSTM on sequential data. Experimental results demonstrate that the sequential models outperform the concatenation-based model. The results of the experiments conclude that the incorporation of a time decay layer (TD) and passing the emotion classification layer (EmoBERTa) through LSTM improves the performance significantly. Experiments concluded that the addition of a self-attention layer didn't significantly improve the performance of the model, however provided easily interpretable attention scores. The developed architecture with the inclusion of EmoBERTa and TD layers achieved a high F1 score, beating existing benchmarks on pathological gambling dataset. Future work may involve the early prediction of risk factors associated with pathological gambling disorder and testing models on other datasets. Overall, this research highlights the significance of the sequential processing of posts including temporal and emotional features to boost the predictive power, as well as adding an attention layer for interpretability.