Opioid death projections with AI-based forecasts using social media language

Targeting of location-specific aid for the U.S. opioid epidemic is difficult due to our inability to accurately predict changes in opioid mortality across heterogeneous communities. AI-based language analyses, having recently shown promise in cross-sectional (between-community) well-being assessments, may offer a way to more accurately longitudinally predict community-level overdose mortality. Here, we develop and evaluate, TrOp (Transformer for Opioid Prediction), a model for community-specific trend projection that uses community-specific social media language along with past opioid-related mortality data to predict future changes in opioid-related deaths. TrOp builds on recent advances in sequence modeling, namely transformer networks, to use changes in yearly language on Twitter and past mortality to predict the following year’s mortality rates by county. Trained over five years and evaluated over the next two years TrOp demonstrated state-of-the-art accuracy in predicting future county-specific opioid deaths. A model built using linear auto-regression and traditional socioeconomic data gave 7% error (MAPE) or within 2.93 deaths per 100,000 people on average; our proposed architecture was able to forecast yearly death rates with less than half that error: 3% MAPE and within 1.15 per 100,000 people.