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Record W4410982926 · doi:10.2196/67964

Detection of Depressive Symptoms in College Students Using Multimodal Passive Sensing Data and Light Gradient Boosting Machine: Longitudinal Pilot Study

2025· article· en· W4410982926 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Jessica L. Borelli, Yuning Wang, Frances Haofei Li, Lyric N. Russo, Marta Tironi, Ken Yamashita, Elayne Zhou, Jocelyn Lai, Brenda Nguyen, Iman Azimi, Christopher Marcotullio, Sina Labbaf, Salar Jafarlou, Nikil Dutt, Amir M. Rahmani

Bibliographic record

VenueJMIR Formative Research · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldPsychology
TopicDigital Mental Health Interventions
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsBoosting (machine learning)Depressive symptomsLongitudinal studyArtificial intelligenceLongitudinal dataGradient boostingComputer sciencePsychologyMachine learningMathematicsStatisticsPsychiatryData miningCognition

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

BACKGROUND: Depression is the top contributor to global disability. Early detection of depression and depressive symptoms enables timely intervention and reduces their physical and social consequences. Prevalence estimates of depression approach 30% among college students. Passive, device-based sensing further enables detection of depressive symptoms at a low burden to the individual. OBJECTIVE: We leveraged an ensemble machine learning method (light gradient boosting machine) to detect depressive symptoms entirely through passive sensing. METHODS: A diverse sample of undergraduate students (N=28; mean age 19.96, SD 1.23 y; 15/28, 54% women; 13/28, 46% Latine; 10/28, 36% Asian; 4/28, 14% non-Latine White; 11/28, 4% other) participated in an intensive longitudinal study. Participants wore 2 devices (an Oura ring for sleep and physiology data, and a Samsung smartwatch for physiology and movement data) and installed the AWARE software on their mobile devices, which collects passive sensing data such as screen time. Participants were derived from a randomized controlled trial of a positive psychology mobile health intervention. They completed a self-report measure of depressive symptoms administered weekly over a 19- to 22-week period. RESULTS: -score of 0.744 and a Cohen κ coefficient of 0.474, indicating moderate agreement between the predicted labels and the ground truth. The most predictive features of depressive symptoms were sleep quality and missed mobile interactions. CONCLUSIONS: Findings suggest that data collected from passive sensing devices may provide real-time, low-cost insight into the detection of depressive symptoms in college students and may present an opportunity for future prevention and perhaps intervention.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.004
Threshold uncertainty score0.008

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.001
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.120
GPT teacher head0.508
Teacher spread0.389 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations7
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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