Abstract
Social media platforms have been widely used as a communication tool where most of the population expresses their feelings and shares life experiences. Along with general information about the public, these platforms hold an ample amount of content related to depressed users and thus can generate sensitive social signals indicating if a person is suffering from some serious issues, such as self-harm, suicidal thoughts, or intention for an unlawful act. Early depression detection using advanced natural language processing (NLP), deep machine learning, and transfer learning techniques can assist in designing an efficient system to detect major depressive systems at an early stage. The current depression detection models are not enough to capture sensitive social signals indicating the true mood, personality, and behavior of an individual. Thus, making the current systems unsatisfactory. To address this life-threatening human-health problem, we propose an efficient artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning (DL)-based model for identifying depressed individuals on social media platforms. The model employs hybrid feature-based behavioral-biometric signals captured using Word2Vec, term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) models to learn a convolutional neural network (CNN) and long-short term memory (LSTM) models. The data are captured from multiple sources using advanced crawling strategies to have data variety in the corpus. Thus, making the proposed system effective across platforms. The Dataset produced by this study is the first of its kind with a variety of depressive signals from online social network (OSN) platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The experiments have shown that both DL models LSTM and CNN, and the hybrid (CNN + LSTM) models achieved promising results on all individual as well as combined datasets. Out of 24 experiments for Word2Vec LSTM and Word2Vec (CNN + LSTM) models, we achieved the accuracy of 99.02% and 99.01%, respectively, and recorded as best results outperforming all the existing approaches on performance measures such as recall, precision, accuracy, and F1-score. The Word2Vec-based features have been proved optimal features for detecting depressions symptoms on Facebook corpus (FC) and YouTube corpus (YC) by achieving an accuracy of 95.02% (with CNN) and 98.15% (with CNN + LSTM), respectively.