How artificial intelligence will save lives in the 21st century - Florida State University News

A groundbreaking project led by a Florida State University researcher makes an exponential advance in suicide prediction, potentially giving clinicians the ability to predict who will attempt suicide up to two years in advance with 80 percent accuracy. FSU Psychology researcher Jessica Ribeiro feels an urgency to confront this relentless problem. Shadowing her research is the ever-present awareness that 120 Americans take their lives every day, nearly 45,000 a year. Ribeiro's paper, titled "Predicting Risk of Suicide Attempts over Time through Machine Learning," will be published by the journal Clinical Psychological Science. The study offers a fascinating finding: machine learning -- a future frontier for artificial intelligence -- can predict with 80-90 percent accuracy whether someone will attempt suicide as far off as two years into the future.