Yuxin Ni, Ying Lu, Fengshi Jing, Qianyun Wang, Yewei Xie, Xi He, Dan Wu, Rayner Kay Jin Tan, Joseph D Tucker, Xumeng Yan, Jason J Ong, Qingpeng Zhang, Hongbo Jiang, Wencan Dai, Liqun Huang, Wenhua Mei, Yi Zhou, Weiming Tang
BACKGROUND: Sexual health influencers (SHIs) are individuals actively sharing sexual health information with their peers, and they play an important role in promoting HIV care services, including the secondary distribution of HIV self-testing (SD-HIVST). Previous studies used a 6-item empirical leadership scale to identify SHIs. However, this approach may be biased as it does not consider individuals' social networks. OBJECTIVE: This study used a quasi-experimental study design to evaluate how well a newly developed machine learning (ML) model identifies SHIs in promoting SD-HIVST compared to SHIs identified by a scale whose validity had been tested before...
April 24, 2024: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance