AIDA: Artificial intelligence based depression assessment applied to Bangladeshi students

Depression is a common psychiatric disorder that is becoming more prevalent in developing countries like Bangladesh. Depression has been found to be prevalent among youths and influences a person’s lifestyle and thought process. Unfortunately, due to the public and social stigma attached to this disease, the mental health issue of individuals are often overlooked. Early diagnosis of patients who may have depression often helps to provide effective treatment. This research aims to develop mechanisms to detect and predict depression levels and was applied to university students in Bangladesh. In this work, a questionnaire containing 106 questions has been constructed. The questions in the questionnaire are primarily of two kinds – (i) personal, and (ii) clinical. The questionnaire was distributed amongst Bangladeshi students and a total of 684 responses (aged between 19 and 35) were obtained. After appropriate consents from the participants, they were allowed to take the survey. After carefully scrutinizing the responses, 520 samples were taken into final consideration. A hybrid depression assessment scale was developed using a voting algorithm that employs eight well-known existing scales to assess the depression level of an individual. This hybrid scale was then applied to the collected samples that comprise personal information and questions from various familiar depression measuring scales. In addition, ten machine learning and two deep learning models were applied to predict the three classes of depression (normal, moderate and extreme). Five hyperparameter optimizers and nine feature selection methods were employed to improve the predictability. Accuracies of 98.08%, 94.23%, and 92.31% were obtained using Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, and CNN models, respectively. Random Forest accomplished the lowest false negatives and highest F Measure with its optimized hyperparameters. Finally, LIME, an explainable AI framework, was applied to interpret and retrace the prediction output of the machine learning models.