Cancer Stage Prediction Based on Patient Online Discourse

Forums and mailing lists dedicated to particular diseases are increasingly popular online. Automatically inferring the health status of a patient can be useful for both forum users and health researchers who study patients’ online behaviors. In this paper, we focus on breast cancer forums and present a method to predict the stage of patients’ cancers from their online discourse. We show that what the patients talk about (content-based features) and whom they interact with (social networkbased features) provide complementary cues to predicting cancer stage and can be leveraged for better prediction. Our methods are extendable and can be applied to other tasks of acquiring contextual information about online health forum participants.