Leveraging large language models for automated depression screening
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mental health diagnoses possess unique challenges that often lead to nuanced difficulties in managing an individual's well-being and daily functioning. Self-report questionnaires are a common practice in clinical settings to help mitigate the challenges involved in mental health disorder screening. However, these questionnaires rely on an individual's subjective response which can be influenced by various factors. Despite the advancements of Large Language Models (LLMs), quantifying self-reported experiences with natural language processing has resulted in imperfect accuracy. This project aims to demonstrate the effectiveness of zero-shot learning LLMs for screening and assessing item scales for depression using LLMs. The DAIC-WOZ is a publicly available mental health dataset that contains textual data from clinical interviews and self-report questionnaires with relevant mental health disorder labels. The RISEN prompt engineering framework was utilized to evaluate LLMs' effectiveness in predicting depression symptoms based on individual PHQ-8 items. Various LLMs, including GPT models, Llama3_8B, Cohere, and Gemini were assessed based on performance. The GPT models, especially GPT-4o, were consistently better than other LLMs (Llama3_8B, Cohere, Gemini) across all eight items of the PHQ-8 scale in accuracy (M = 75.9%), and F1 score (0.74). GPT models were able to predict PHQ-8 items related to emotional and cognitive states. Llama 3_8B demonstrated superior detection of anhedonia-related symptoms and the Cohere LLM's strength was identifying and predicting psychomotor activity symptoms. This study provides a novel outlook on the potential of LLMs for predicting self-reported questionnaire scores from textual interview data. The promising preliminary performance of the various models indicates there is potential that these models could effectively assist in the screening of depression. Further research is needed to establish a framework for which LLM can be used for specific mental health symptoms and other disorders. As well, analysis of additional datasets while fine-tuning models should be explored.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".