EMITTER International Journal of Engineering Technology
Vol 14 No 1 (2026)

Particle Swarm Optimization–Tuned Random Forest for Multi-Class Mental Health Sentiment Classification from Textual Data

Supriady (Universitas Logistik dan Bisnis International)
Ode Andi Alamsyah (Universitas Logistik dan Bisnis International)
Nesya Salma Ramadhani (Universitas Logistik dan Bisnis International)
Syafrial Fachri Pane (Universitas Logistik dan Bisnis Internasional)



Article Info

Publish Date
30 Jun 2026

Abstract

Mental health sentiment classification from textual data has attracted increasing attention as a computational approach to support large-scale psychological assessment; however, multi-class classification remains challenging due to noisy text, class imbalance, and semantic overlap among categories. This study proposes and evaluates a machine learning framework for seven-class mental health sentiment classification that integrates enhanced text preprocessing with lemmatization, data augmentation via back-translation, TF-IDF feature extraction, and systematic model evaluation across multiple classifiers, including Logistic Regression, Decision Tree, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, K-Nearest Neighbors, AdaBoost, and XGBoost, under three hyperparameter tuning strategies: Grid Search, Random Search, and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). Experimental results indicate that ensemble-based models consistently outperform single classifiers, with the PSO-optimized Random Forest achieving the best numerical performance, attaining an accuracy of 0.933, a macro F1-score of 0.923, and a ROC AUC of 0.989, demonstrating strong generalization and balanced class-level performance despite dataset imbalance. These findings confirm that the combination of robust preprocessing and metaheuristic-based hyperparameter optimization significantly enhances multi-class mental health sentiment classification and supports its potential use as a scalable decision-support tool for large-scale mental health screening, while not intended to replace clinical diagnosis.

Copyrights © 2026






Journal Info

Abbrev

EMITTER

Publisher

Subject

Computer Science & IT

Description

EMITTER International Journal of Engineering Technology is a BI-ANNUAL journal published by Politeknik Elektronika Negeri Surabaya (PENS). It aims to encourage initiatives, to share new ideas, and to publish high-quality articles in the field of engineering technology and available to everybody at ...