Citation

Hui V, Constantino RE, Lee YJ. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2023; 20(6).

Copyright

(Copyright © 2023, MDPI: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute)

DOI

10.3390/ijerph20064984

PMID

36981893

PMCID

PMC10049304

Abstract

Domestic violence (DV) is a public health crisis that threatens both the mental and physical health of people. With the unprecedented surge in data available on the internet and electronic health record systems, leveraging machine learning (ML) to detect obscure changes and predict the likelihood of DV from digital text data is a promising area health science research. However, there is a paucity of research discussing and reviewing ML applications in DV research.

METHODS: We extracted 3588 articles from four databases. Twenty-two articles met the inclusion criteria.

RESULTS: Twelve articles used the supervised ML method, seven articles used the unsupervised ML method, and three articles applied both. Most studies were published in Australia (n = 6) and the United States (n = 4). Data sources included social media, professional notes, national databases, surveys, and newspapers. Random forest (n = 9), support vector machine (n = 8), and naïve Bayes (n = 7) were the top three algorithms, while the most used automatic algorithm for unsupervised ML in DV research was latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) for topic modeling (n = 2). Eight types of outcomes were identified, while three purposes of ML and challenges were delineated and are discussed.

CONCLUSIONS: Leveraging the ML method to tackle DV holds unprecedented potential, especially in classification, prediction, and exploration tasks, and particularly when using social media data. However, adoption challenges, data source issues, and lengthy data preparation times are the main bottlenecks in this context. To overcome those challenges, early ML algorithms have been developed and evaluated on DV clinical data.

Language: en

Keywords

Humans; United States; abuse; machine learning; intimate partner violence; big data; domestic violence; Machine Learning; *Domestic Violence; *Social Media; Bayes Theorem; Unsupervised Machine Learning