Drug Usage Safety from Drug Reviews with Hybrid Machine Learning Approach

With the increasing usage of drugs to remedy different diseases, drug safety has become crucial over the past few years. Often medicine from several companies is offered for a single disease that involves the same/similar substances with slightly different formulae. Such diversification is both helpful and dangerous as such medicine proves to be more effective or shows side effects to different patients. Despite clinical trials, side effects are reported when the medicine is used by the mass public, of which several such experiences are shared on social media platforms. A system capable of analyzing such reviews could be very helpful to assist healthcare professionals and companies for evaluating the safety of drugs after it has been marketed. Sentiment analysis of drug reviews has a large potential for providing valuable insights into these cases. Therefore, this study proposes an approach to perform analysis on the drug safety reviews using lexicon-based and deep learning techniques. A dataset acquired from the ‘Drugs.Com’ containing reviews of drug-related side effects and reactions, is used for experiments. A lexicon-based approach, Textblob is used to extract the positive, negative or neutral sentiment from the review text. Review classification is achieved using a novel hybrid deep learning model of convolutional neural networks and long short-term memory (CNN-LSTM) network. The CNN is used at the first level to extract the appropriate features while LSTM is used at the second level. Several well-known machine learning models including logistic regression, random forest, decision tree, and AdaBoost are evaluated using term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF), a bag of words (BoW), feature union of (TF-IDF + BoW), and lexicon-based methods. Performance analysis with machine learning models, long short term memory and convolutional neural network models, and state-of-the-art approaches indicate that the proposed CNN-LSTM model shows superior performance with an 0.96 accuracy. We also performed a statistical significance T-test to show the significance of the proposed CNN-LSTM model in comparison with other approaches.