Predictive Modeling of Stress in the Healthcare Industry During COVID-19: A Novel Approach Using XGBoost, SHAP Values, and Tree Explainer

There was a substantial medicine shortage and an increase in morbidity due to the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in India. This pandemic has also had a drastic impact on healthcare professionals' psychological health as they were surrounded by suffering, death, and isolation. Healthcare practitioners in North India were sent a self-administered questionnaire based on the COVID-19 Stress Scale (N = 436) from March to May 2021. With 10-fold cross-validation, extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) was used to predict the individual stress levels. XGBoost classifier was applied, and classification accuracy was 88%. The results of this research show that approximately 52.6% of healthcare specialists in the dataset exceed the severe psychiatric morbidity standards. Further, to determine which attribute had a significant impact on stress prediction, advanced techniques (SHAP values), and tree explainer were applied. The two most significant stress predictors were found to be medicine shortage and trouble in concentrating.