LMILAtt: A Deep Learning Model for Depression Detection from Social Media Users Enhanced by Multi-Instance Learning Based on Attention Mechanism

Depression is a major global public health challenge and its early identification is crucial. Social media data provides a new perspective for depression detection, but existing methods face limitations such as insufficient accuracy, insufficient utilization of time series features, and high annotation costs. To this end, this study proposes the LMILAtt model, which innovatively integrates Long Short-Term Memory autoencoders and attention mechanisms: firstly, the temporal dynamic features of user tweets (such as depressive tendency evolution patterns) are extracted through unsupervised LSTM autoencoders. Secondly, the attention mechanism is used to dynamically weight key texts (such as early depression signals) and construct a multi-example learning architecture to improve the accuracy of user-level detection. Finally, the performance was verified on the WU3D dataset labeled by professional medicine. Experiments show that the model is significantly better than the baseline model in terms of accuracy, recall and F1 score. In addition, the weakly supervised learning strategy significantly reduces the cost of labeling and provides an efficient solution for large-scale social media depression screening.