# Aggregating Search Logs and Self-esteem for Identifying Individuals with History of Suicide Ideation

Machine Learning –> Bayesian Inference; Mental Health.

• We propose a framework for identifying individuals with a history of suicide ideation from their daily online search logs. A total of $1,043,855$ searches were collected from $120$ college students, with an average of $10926$ searches per participant, spanning over $4.21$ years of search history. The participants also filled out a gold-standard mental health assessment survey.

• To detect the history of suicide ideation, we first examined both semantic search content category features and temporal recurrence and frequency features. Using those features, we develop a novel encoding that projects these aspects of search behaviors into a low dimensional vector space. Our supervised model incorporates both in-the-moment online behaviors and the ground truth self-esteem for identifying individuals with a history of suicide ideation and verifies the hypothesis that including self-esteem during modeling improves the suicide ideation detection task.

• Labels for the training and testing sets were drawn from professional mental health surveys. Our highest-performing graphical model achieved a classification F1 score of $0.83$ with an AUC of $0.81$ on a stratified test set population. Our framework of leveraging passively sensed search data could help caregivers and practitioners to identify individuals with a potential history of suicide ideation and extend help.

• My Contribution: I was the third author of this paper. I first proposed a spatio-temporal representation for Google Search histories and self-esteem scores. I then designed a graphical model optimized by MCMC methods that incorporates the latent interdependence between self-esteem, cognitive states, and online engagements to identify past suicidal ideation.