Identifying peer experts in online health forums

Background Online health forums have become increasingly popular over the past several years. They provide members with a platform to network with peers and share information, experiential advice, and support. Among the members of health forums, we define “peer experts” as a set of lay users who have gained expertise on the particular health topic through personal experience, and who demonstrate credibility in responding to questions from other members. This paper aims to motivate the need to identify peer experts in health forums and study their characteristics. Methods We analyze profiles and activity of members of a popular online health forum and characterize the interaction behavior of peer experts. We study the temporal patterns of comments posted by lay users and peer experts to uncover how peer expertise is developed. We further train a supervised classifier to identify peer experts based on their activity level, textual features, and temporal progression of posts. Result A support vector machine classifier with radial basis function kernel was found to be the most suitable model among those studied. Features capturing the key semantic word classes and higher mean user activity were found to be most significant features. Conclusion We define a new class of members of health forums called peer experts, and present preliminary, yet promising, approaches to distinguish peer experts from novice users. Identifying such peer expertise could potentially help improve the perceived reliability and trustworthiness of information in community health forums.