Assessing ML classification algorithms and NLP techniques for depression detection: An experimental case study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
CONTEXT AND BACKGROUND: Depression has affected millions of people worldwide and has become one of the most common mental disorders. Early mental disorder detection can reduce costs for public health agencies and prevent other major comorbidities. Additionally, the shortage of specialized personnel is very concerning since depression diagnosis is highly dependent on expert professionals and is time-consuming. Research problems. Recent research has evidenced that machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) tools and techniques have significantly benefited the diagnosis of depression. However, there are still several challenges in the assessment of depression detection approaches in which other conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are present. These challenges include assessing alternatives in terms of data cleaning and pre-processing techniques, feature selection, and appropriate ML classification algorithms. PURPOSE OF THE STUDY: This paper tackles such an assessment based on a case study that compares different ML classifiers, specifically in terms of data cleaning and pre-processing, feature selection, parameter setting, and model choices. METHODOLOGY: The experimental case study is based on the Distress Analysis Interview Corpus - Wizard-of-Oz (DAIC-WOZ) dataset, which is designed to support the diagnosis of mental disorders such as depression, anxiety, and PTSD. MAJOR FINDINGS: Besides the assessment of alternative techniques, we were able to build models with accuracy levels around 84% with Random Forest and XGBoost models, which is significantly higher than the results from the comparable literature which presented the level of accuracy of 72% from the SVM model. CONCLUSIONS: More comprehensive assessments of ML classification algorithms and NLP techniques for depression detection can advance the state of the art in terms of improved experimental settings and performance.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".