Machine Learning Model to Predict Assignment of Therapy Homework in Behavioral Treatments: Algorithm Development and Validation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Therapeutic homework is a core element of cognitive and behavioral interventions, and greater homework compliance predicts improved treatment outcomes. To date, research in this area has relied mostly on therapists' and clients' self-reports or studies carried out in academic settings, and there is little knowledge on how homework is used as a treatment intervention in routine clinical care. OBJECTIVE: This study tested whether a machine learning (ML) model using natural language processing could identify homework assignments in behavioral health sessions. By leveraging this technology, we sought to develop a more objective and accurate method for detecting the presence of homework in therapy sessions. METHODS: We analyzed 34,497 audio-recorded treatment sessions provided in 8 behavioral health care programs via an artificial intelligence (AI) platform designed for therapy provided by Eleos Health. Therapist and client utterances were captured and analyzed via the AI platform. Experts reviewed the homework assigned in 100 sessions to create classifications. Next, we sampled 4000 sessions and labeled therapist-client microdialogues that suggested homework to train an unsupervised sentence embedding model. This model was trained on 2.83 million therapist-client microdialogues. RESULTS: -score, outperforming state-of-the-art ML models. The therapists reviewing the microdialogues agreed in 90% (n=90) of cases on whether or not homework was assigned. CONCLUSIONS: The findings of this study demonstrate the potential of ML and natural language processing to improve the detection of therapeutic homework assignments in behavioral health sessions. Our findings highlight the importance of accurately capturing homework in real-world settings and the potential for AI to support therapists in providing evidence-based care and increasing fidelity with science-backed interventions. By identifying areas where AI can facilitate homework assignments and tracking, such as reminding therapists to prescribe homework and reducing the charting associated with homework, we can ultimately improve the overall quality of behavioral health care. Additionally, our approach can be extended to investigate the impact of homework assignments on therapeutic outcomes, providing insights into the effectiveness of specific types of homework.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".