A Transfer Learning Application on the Reliability of Psychological Drugs' Comments

Abstract

As digitalization and the Internet stay emerging concepts by gaining popularity, the accuracy of personal reviews/opinions will be a critical issue. This circumstance also particularly applies to patients taking psychological drugs, where accurate information is crucial for other patients and medical professionals. In this study, we analyze drug reviews from drugs.com to determine the effectiveness of reviews for psychological drugs. Our dataset includes over 200,000 drug reviews, which we labeled as positive, negative, or neutral according to their rating scores. We apply machine learning (ML) models, including Logistic Regression, Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) algorithms, to predict the sentiment class of each review. Our results demonstrate an F1-Weighted score of 85.3% for the LSTM model. However, by applying the transfer learning technique, we further improved the F1 score (nearly 3% increase) obtained by the LSTM model. Our findings proved that there is no contextual difference between the comments made by the patients suffering from psychological or other diseases. © 2023 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.