An Automated System for Depression Detection Based on Facial and Vocal Features

Diagnosing depression is a challenge due to the subjective nature of traditional tools like questionnaires and interviews. Researchers are exploring alternative methods for detecting depression, such as using facial and vocal features. This study investigated the potential of facial and vocal features for depression detection using two datasets: images of facial expressions with emotion labels, and a vocal expression dataset with positive and negative words. Four deep-learning models were evaluated for depression detection from facial expressions, and two traditional machine-learning models were trained for sentiment analysis on the vocal expression dataset. The CNN model performed best for facial expression analysis, while the Naive Bayes model performed best for vocal expression analysis. The models were integrated into a web application for depression analysis, allowing users to upload a video and receive an analysis of their facial and vocal expressions for signs of depression. This study demonstrates the potential of using facial and vocal features for depression detection and provides insight into the performance of different machine learning algorithms for this task. The web application has the potential to be a useful tool for individuals monitoring their mental health and may support mental health professionals in their clinical assessments of depression

Investigating machine learning techniques for detection of depression using structural MRI volumetric features

Structural MRI offers anatomical details and high sensitivity to pathological changes. It can demonstrate certain patterns of brain changes present at a structural level. Research to date has shown that volumetric analysis of brain regions has importance in depression detection. However, such analysis has had very minimal use in depression detection studies at individual level. Optimally combining various brain volumetric features/attributes, and summarizing the data into a distinctive set of variables remain difficult. This study investigates machine learning algorithms that automatically identify relevant data attributes for depression detection. Different machine learning techniques are studied for depression classification based on attributes extracted from structural MRI (sMRI) data. The attributes include volume calculated from whole brain, white matter, grey matter and hippocampus. Attributes subset selection is performed aiming to remove redundant attributes using three filtering methods and one hybrid method, in combination with ranker search algorithms. The highest average classification accuracy, obtained by using a combination of both SVM-EM and IG-Random Tree algorithms, is 85.23%. The classification approach implemented in this study can achieve higher accuracy than most reported studies using sMRI data, specifically for detection of depression

Semi-Supervised Approach to Monitoring Clinical Depressive Symptoms in Social Media

With the rise of social media, millions of people are routinely expressing their moods, feelings, and daily struggles with mental health issues on social media platforms like Twitter. Unlike traditional observational cohort studies conducted through questionnaires and self-reported surveys, we explore the reliable detection of clinical depression from tweets obtained unobtrusively. Based on the analysis of tweets crawled from users with self-reported depressive symptoms in their Twitter profiles, we demonstrate the potential for detecting clinical depression symptoms which emulate the PHQ-9 questionnaire clinicians use today. Our study uses a semi-supervised statistical model to evaluate how the duration of these symptoms and their expression on Twitter (in terms of word usage patterns and topical preferences) align with the medical findings reported via the PHQ-9. Our proactive and automatic screening tool is able to identify clinical depressive symptoms with an accuracy of 68% and precision of 72%.Comment: 8 pages, Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), 2017 IEEE/ACM International Conferenc

Instagram photos reveal predictive markers of depression

Using Instagram data from 166 individuals, we applied machine learning tools to successfully identify markers of depression. Statistical features were computationally extracted from 43,950 participant Instagram photos, using color analysis, metadata components, and algorithmic face detection. Resulting models outperformed general practitioners’ average unassisted diagnostic success rate for depression. These results held even when the analysis was restricted to posts made before depressed individuals were first diagnosed. Human ratings of photo attributes (happy, sad, etc.) were weaker predictors of depression, and were uncorrelated with computationally-generated features. These results suggest new avenues for early screening and detection of mental illness

Combining Sentiment Lexicons and Content-Based Features for Depression Detection

Numerous studies on mental depression have found that tweets posted by users with major depressive disorder could be utilized for depression detection. The potential of sentiment analysis for detecting depression through an analysis of social media messages has brought increasing attention to this field. In this article, we propose 90 unique features as input to a machine learning classifier framework for detecting depression using social media texts. Derived from a combination of feature extraction approaches using sentiment lexicons and textual contents, these features are able to provide impressive results in terms of depression detection. While the performance of different feature groups varied, the combination of all features resulted in accuracies greater than 96% for all standard single classifiers, and the best accuracy of over 98% with Gradient Boosting, an ensemble classifier

Multi-head attention-based long short-term memory for depression detection from speech.

Depression is a mental disorder that threatens the health and normal life of people. Hence, it is essential to provide an effective way to detect depression. However, research on depression detection mainly focuses on utilizing different parallel features from audio, video, and text for performance enhancement regardless of making full usage of the inherent information from speech. To focus on more emotionally salient regions of depression speech, in this research, we propose a multi-head time-dimension attention-based long short-term memory (LSTM) model. We first extract frame-level features to store the original temporal relationship of a speech sequence and then analyze their difference between speeches of depression and those of health status. Then, we study the performance of various features and use a modified feature set as the input of the LSTM layer. Instead of using the output of the traditional LSTM, multi-head time-dimension attention is employed to obtain more key time information related to depression detection by projecting the output into different subspaces. The experimental results show the proposed model leads to improvements of 2.3 and 10.3% over the LSTM model on the Distress Analysis Interview Corpus-Wizard of Oz (DAIC-WOZ) and the Multi-modal Open Dataset for Mental-disorder Analysis (MODMA) corpus, respectively

Depression Detection Using Stacked Autoencoder from Facial Features and NLP

Depression has become one of the most common mental illnesses in the past decade, affecting millions of patients and their families. However, the methods of diagnosing depression almost exclusively rely on questionnaire-based interviews and clinical judgments of symptom severity, which are highly dependent on doctors’ experience and makes it a labor-intensive work. This research work aims to develop an objective and convenient method to assist depression detection using facial features as well as textual features. Most of the people conceal their depression from everyone. So, an automated system is required that will pick out them who are dealing with depression. In this research, different research work focused for detecting depression are discussed and a hybrid approach is developed for detecting depression using facial as well as textual features. The main purpose of this research work is to design and propose a hybrid system of combining the effect of three effective models: Natural Language Processing, Stacked Deep Auto Encoder with Random forest (RF) classifier and fuzzy logic based on multi-feature depression detection system. According to literature several fingerprint as well as fingervein recognition system are designed that uses various techniques in order to reduce false detection rate and to enhance the performance of the system. A comparative study of different recognition technique along with their limitations is also summarized and optimum approach is proposed which may enhance the performance of the system. The result analysis shows that the developed technique significantly advantages over existing methods

Transferring speech-generic and depression-specific knowledge for Alzheimer's disease detection

The detection of Alzheimer's disease (AD) from spontaneous speech has attracted increasing attention while the sparsity of training data remains an important issue. This paper handles the issue by knowledge transfer, specifically from both speech-generic and depression-specific knowledge. The paper first studies sequential knowledge transfer from generic foundation models pretrained on large amounts of speech and text data. A block-wise analysis is performed for AD diagnosis based on the representations extracted from different intermediate blocks of different foundation models. Apart from the knowledge from speech-generic representations, this paper also proposes to simultaneously transfer the knowledge from a speech depression detection task based on the high comorbidity rates of depression and AD. A parallel knowledge transfer framework is studied that jointly learns the information shared between these two tasks. Experimental results show that the proposed method improves AD and depression detection, and produces a state-of-the-art F1 score of 0.928 for AD diagnosis on the commonly used ADReSSo dataset.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures. Accepted by ASRU 202