Detecting depression using an ensemble classifier based on Quality of Life scales

Abstract

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is an issue that affects 350 million people worldwide. Traditional approaches have been to identify depressive symptoms in datasets, but recently, research is beginning to explore the association between psychosocial factors such as those on the quality of life scale and mental well-being, which will lead to earlier diagnosis and prediction of MDD. In this research, an ensemble binary classifier is proposed to analyse health survey data against ground truth from the SF-20 Quality of Life scales. The classifier aims to improve the performance of machine learning techniques on large datasets and identify depressed cases based on associations between items on the QoL scale and mental illness by increasing predictive performance. On the experimental evaluation on the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), the classifier demonstrated an F1 score of 0.976 in the prediction, without any incorrectly identified depression instances. Only about 4% of instances had been mistakenly classified into depressed cases, with a significant accuracy of 95.4% comparing to the result from PHQ-9 mental screen inventory. The presented ensemble binary classifier performed comparably better than each baseline algorithm in all measures and all experiments. We trained the ensemble model on the processed NHANES dataset, tested and evaluated the results of its performance against mental screen inventory and discussed the comparable predictions. Finally, we provided future research directions.