Ensemble Methods to Optimize Automated Text Classification in Avatar Therapy

Background: Psychotherapeutic approaches such as Avatar Therapy (AT) are novel therapeutic attempts to help patients diagnosed with treatment-resistant schizophrenia. Qualitative analyses of immersive sessions of AT have been undertaken to enhance and refine the existing interventions taking place in this therapy. To account for the time-consuming and costly nature and potential misclassification biases, prior implementation of a Linear Support Vector Classifier provided helpful insight. Single model implementation for text classification is often limited, especially for datasets containing imbalanced data. The main objective of this study is to evaluate the change in accuracy of automated text classification machine learning algorithms when using an ensemble approach for immersive session verbatims of AT. Methods: An ensemble model, comprising five machine learning algorithms, was implemented to conduct text classification for avatar and patient interactions. The models included in this study are: Multinomial Naïve Bayes, Linear Support Vector Classifier, Multi-layer perceptron classifier, XGBClassifier and the K-Nearest-Neighbor model. Accuracy, precision, recall and f1-score were compared for the individual classifiers and the ensemble model. Results: The ensemble model performed better than its individual counterparts for accuracy. Conclusion: Using an ensemble methodological approach, this methodology might be employed in future research to provide insight into the interactions being categorized and the therapeutical outcome of patients based on their experience with AT with optimal precision.