Abstract
Little is known about the association of social media and belief in alcohol and cancer with binge drinking. This study aimed to perform feature selection and develop machine learning (ML) tools to predict occurrence of binge drinking among adults in the United State. A total of 5,886 adults including 1,252 who ever experienced with binge drinking were selected from the 2022 Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS 6). Feature selection of 69 variables was conducted using Boruta and the Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO). The Random Over Sampling Example (ROSE) method was utilized to deal with the imbalance data. Seven machine learning (ML) tools including the Support Vector Machines (SVMs) algorithms, Logistic Regression, Naïve Bayes, Random Forest, K-Nearest Neighbor, Gradient Boosting Machine, and XGBoost were applied to develop ML models to predict binge drinking. The overall prevalence of binge drinking among U.S. adults is 21.3%. Both Boruta and LASSO selected 28 identical variables. SVM with Radial Basis Function revealed the best model with the highest accuracy of 0.949 and sensitivity of 0.958. The top risk factors of binge drinking were tobacco use (e-cigarette use and smoking status), belief in alcohol (alcohol decreases the risk of future health), belief in cancer (prevention is not possible, worry about getting cancer), and social media (social media visits and sharing health information). These findings underscore the need for multiple health behavior interventions to enhance education related to alcohol use and cancer and how to effectively employ social media to improve health outcomes.