A Machine Learning Approach for Rating the Quality of Depression Treatment Web Pages

Abstract

As health care information proliferates on the web, the content quality is varied and difficult to assess, partially due to the large volume and the dynamicity. This paper reports an automated approach in which the quality of depression treatment web pages is assessed according to evidence-based depression treatment guidelines. A supervised machine learning technique, specifically Naive Bayes classification, is used to identify the sentences that are consistent with the guidelines. The quality score of a depression treatment web page is the number of unique evidence-based guidelines covered in this page. Significant Pearson correlation (p<.001) was found between the quality rating results by the machine learning approach and the results by human raters on 31 depression treatment web pages in this case study. The semantic-based, machine learning quality rating method is promising and it may lead to an efficient and effective quality assessment mechanism for health care information on the Web.