ALIGARH MUSLIM UNIVERSITY

Department of Computer Science

Project report – I
Synopsis
for
“Exploring depression discourse on Twitter and

Facebook”

Under the supervision of

Prof. ARMAN RASOOL FARIDI

Submitted by:
AREEBA MANSOOR ANSARI
22-CAMSA-117
GI0589
MCA(IV Semester)

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1. PROJECT TITLE
“EXPLORING DEPRESSION DISCOURSE ON TWITTER AND
FACEBOOK”

2. INTRODUCTION
According to the World Health Organization, depression is the most prevalent mental disorder,
which affects more than 300 million people worldwide. Depression is also the leading cause of
more than two-thirds of suicides every year. However, due to self-denial among some patients
and poor recognition of the issue in many places, depression can remain undiagnosed untreated.
The lack of diagnosis and treatment can further aggravate the condition, which could lead to
reduced quality of life and, in acute cases, an inability to maintain employment
Social media channel such as twitter and Facebook have altered our world forever. Recent
studies have indicated a correlation between high usage of social media sets and increased
depression. Depression is a common mental illness and a leading cause of disability worldwide,
which may cause suicides.
Numerous studies in the literature agree that social media platforms, where people freely share
their thoughts and express their feelings, could be a vital source for monitoring health issues
and trends. Posts on platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, enable researchers to investigate
multiple aspects of psychological concerns and human behavior. Studies focusing on mental
depression, for example, have found that tweets posted by individuals with a major depressive
disorder could be utilized to predict future episodes of depression in those individuals’ social
media platform has become an integral part of modern communications providing individual
with a platform to express their thoughts, feelings and experiences. Machine learning
techniques for detecting a probable depressed twitter /Facebook use based on both his/her
network behavior and tweets /posts. Fortunately, application of the machine learning (ML)
approach to text data from social media can provide an effective solution to this question. Social
media such as Twitter, Facebook, discussion forums, and microblogs have long since become
popular platforms for expressing and recording individuals’ personalities, feelings, moods,
thoughts, and behaviors. Social media in this review refers to a cluster of applications that build
upon technological and ideological foundations
Posts on Facebook and tweet posted by individuals with major depressive disorder as well as
their social media activity can be utilized to classify and predict if they are suffering from
depression or are likely to suffer. This contribute to better understanding of how social media
platforms can be utilized for better mental health awareness and support.

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3. PROBLEM STATEMENT
The current way of studying how people talk about depression on social media is by having
people read and analyses the posts one by one requires manual coding. Researchers typically
collect a sample of posts related to depression from platforms like twitter and Facebook and
manually code for their sentiment. Depression is one of the leading causes of suicide
worldwide. However, a large percentage of cases of depression go undiagnosed and, thus,
untreated. Previous studies have found that messages posted by individuals with major
depressive disorder on social media platforms can be analyzed to predict if they are suffering,
or likely to suffer, from depression. social media users' posts will be analysed to see if machine
learning can be used to identify symptoms of depression. Some of the limitations are:
 Traditionally, depression is detected using standardized scales requiring
patients’ subjective responses or clinical diagnoses given by attending
clinicians’ methods that have some shortcomings.
 Firstly, people’s responses to standardized scales administered in the traditional
way are likely to be affected by context, the patient’s mental status at the time,
the relationship between the clinician and the patient, the patient’s current mood,
and the patient’s past experiences and memory bias.
 Traditional diagnostic methods also lack temporal granularity. Secondly, people
may be unaware or ashamed of their depressive symptoms and unlikely to
consult with professional clinicians, especially in the early stages of depression.
 Finally, detection of depression by traditional methods, being dependent on
face-to-face interviews, is costly in terms of both money and time and
unaffordable for some people.
 Therefore, a more cost-effective method for detecting cases of depression,
applicable to large populations, is needed.
 Generally, depression is diagnosed through face-to-face clinical depression criteria, at
early stages depression,70% of the patients would consult doctors which may take their
condition to advance stage.
 Collecting a large dataset is not scalable as it takes a lot of time in reading and analyzing
trends and patters in large dataset manually.
 Manual coding is subjective as different coders may interpret the same post differently.
 It is not always accurate and can miss important information as it is based on manual
coding and qualitative analysis.
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4. OBJECTIVE AND SCOPE
As a solution to the shortcomings of the current system, a method of examining conversations
on depression on social media. In order to examine big datasets of publicly posted messages
about depression on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, this method will make use
of natural language processing (NLP) tools. Through the application of natural language
processing (NLP) tools, it is possible to conduct a more methodical and effective analysis of
the language employed, the subjects covered, and the general mood of the discourse on these
platforms. Machine learning (ML) methods could be effectively used to detect depression in
people by analyzing their social media texts, but without relying on specific keywords. Social
media texts are often unstructured, and therefore ML, which is good at dealing with
nonlinearity, is expected to be NLP a better option than traditional statistical methods for
analyzing them. Even though we train the ML models using Twitter posts in this study, they
should be equally applicable to other text-based messages.The primary objectives are as
follows:
 Using NLP techniques, will reduce the subjectivity of the analysis, leading to more
reliable and consistent findings.
 Analysing larger datasets and seeing trends and patterns in the conversation about
depression on social media platforms, the suggested approach will be more effective.
 Regardless of who is doing the analysing, reducing the variability in the findings.
 Compared to the current system, be more accurate, enabling improved data and insights.
 Will be quicker than the current approach, enabling the analysis of bigger datasets and
the discovery of patterns and trends in the conversation around depression on social
media.
ML approach, potentially be a useful tool for monitoring social media user populations for
early traces of depression and a complementary tool to well-established methods of depression
detection

5. Scope:
 Implementation of machine learning models for analysing historical data and
generating predictions of mental illness.
 Provision of interactive visualization tools to aid users in interpreting analysis results
effectively.
 Documentation of the platform's features, functionalities, and technical pacifications to
facilitate user understanding and support.
  Will using NLP techniques to analyse the language used, the topics discussed, and the
overall sentiment of depression discourse on Twitter and Facebook. This will allow for
a more systematic and efficient analysis of large datasets.
 Will give light on how depression is discussed and viewed, as well as the nature of the
discourse surrounding depression on Facebook and Twitter.
 This will guide the creation of plans for using social media to raise awareness of and
provide support for mental health

6. SALIENT FEATURES
6.1. NLP Based Analysis:
Implementing machine learning models to analyze historical data and generate predictions
based on learned patterns and trends.

6.2. Live tweet:

Integrating the twitter API to fetch and display Tweet from different users, providing users
with insights into depression sentiment

6.3. User-Friendly Interface:

Designing an intuitive and responsive user interface for seamless navigation and interaction.

6.4. Historical Data Visualization:

Providing interactive charts and graphs to visualize historical data trends, aiding in analysis
and decision-making.

6.5. Performance Monitoring:

Implementing tools to monitor the performance of models and adjust parameters as needed
to improve accuracy.
This provides comprehensive tool for making informed decisions about the depression,
leveraging the power of machine learning.

7. Methodology: Tools and Techniques

7.1. Scikit-learn:
Scikit-learn is one of the most widely used libraries for traditional machine learning algorithms.
It provides simple and efficient tools for data mining and data analysis, including classification,
regression, clustering, dimensionality reduction, and model selection.
These libraries are implementations of gradient boosting algorithms, which are widely used in
machine learning competitions and production environments for tasks like classification,
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regression, and ranking.
7.2. Pandas:
While Pandas is primarily a data manipulation and analysis library, it's indispensable in the
machine learning workflow for data preprocessing, cleaning, and transformation. It provides
data structures and functions to work with structured data efficiently.

7.3. NumPy and SciPy:

NumPy and SciPy are fundamental libraries for scientific computing in Python. NumPy
provides support for multidimensional arrays and matrices, while SciPy offers a wide range of
scientific and numerical algorithms.
7.4. NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit):
NLTK is a leading platform for building Python programs to work with human language data.
It provides easy-to-use interfaces to over 50 corpora and lexical resources, along with a suite
of text processing libraries for classification, tokenization, stemming, tagging, parsing, and
more.
7.5. Seaborn / Matplotlib:
These libraries are used for data visualization in Python. Seaborn is built on top of Matplotlib
and provides a high-level interface for drawing attractive and informative statistical graphics.
7.6. Text Blob:
Text Blob is built on top of NLTK and provides a simple API for common natural language
processing (NLP) tasks, including sentiment analysis. It offers a sentiment analysis module that
uses a sentiment lexicon-based approach.
7.7. VADER (Valence Aware Dictionary and sentiment Reasoner):
VADER is a rule-based sentiment analysis tool specifically designed for analyzing sentiments
expressed in social media texts. It's particularly good at handling text data with emoticons,
slang, and other informal expressions.

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