Detecting Drug Non-Compliance in Internet Fora Using Information Retrieval and Machine Learning Approaches

Non-compliance situations happen when patients do not follow their prescriptions and take actions that lead to potentially harmful situations. Although such situations are dangerous, patients usually do not report them to their physicians. Hence, it is necessary to study other sources of information. We propose to study online health fora. The purpose of our work is to explore online health fora with supervised classification and information retrieval methods in order to identify messages that contain drug non-compliance. The supervised classification method permits detection of non-compliance with up to 0.824 F-measure, while the information retrieval method permits detection non-compliance with up to 0.529 F-measure. For some fine-grained categories and new data, it shows up to 0.65-0.70 Precision.