Improving Healthcare Communication: AI-Driven Emotion Classification in Imbalanced Patient Text Data with Explainable Models

Sentiment analysis is crucial in healthcare to understand patients’ emotions, automatically identifying the feelings of patients suffering from serious illnesses (cancer, AIDS, or Ebola) with an artificial intelligence model that constitutes a major challenge to help health professionals. This study presents a comparative study on different machine learning (logistic regression, naive Bayes, and LightGBM) and deep learning models: long short-term memory (LSTM) and bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) for classify health feelings thanks to textual data related to patients with serious illnesses. Considering the class imbalance of the dataset, various resampling techniques are investigated. The approach is complemented by an explainable model, LIME, to understand the shortcomings of the classification results. The results highlight the superior performance of the BERT and LSTM models with an F1-score of 89%.