<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<p>Depression is one of the primary causes of global mental illnesses and an underlying reason for suicide. The user generated text content available in social media forums offers an opportunity to build automatic and reliable depression detection models. The core objective of this work is to select an optimal set of features that may help in classifying depressive contents posted on social media. To this end, a novel multi-objective feature selection technique (EFS-pBGSK) and machine learning algorithms are employed to train the proposed model. The novel feature selection technique incorporates a binary gaining-sharing knowledge-based optimization algorithm with population reduction (pBGSK) to obtain the optimized features from the original feature space. The extensive feature selector (EFS) is used to filter out the excessive features based on their ranking. Two text depression datasets collected from Twitter and Reddit forums are used for the evaluation of the proposed feature selection model. The experimentation is carried out using naive Bayes (NB) and support vector machine (SVM) classifiers for five different feature subset sizes (10, 50, 100, 300 and 500). The experimental outcome indicates that the proposed model can achieve superior performance scores. The top results are obtained using the SVM classifier for the SDD dataset with 0.962 accuracy, 0.929 F1 score, 0.0809 log-loss and 0.0717 mean absolute error (MAE). As a result, the optimal combination of features selected by the proposed hybrid model significantly improves the performance of the depression detection system.</p>
</abstract>

Depression is one of the primary causes of global mental illnesses and an underlying reason for suicide. The user generated text content available in social media forums offers an opportunity to build automatic and reliable depression detection models. The core objective of this work is to select an optimal set of features that may help in classifying depressive contents posted on social media. To this end, a novel multi-objective feature selection technique (EFS-pBGSK) and machine learning algorithms are employed to train the proposed model. The novel feature selection technique incorporates a binary gaining-sharing knowledge-based optimization algorithm with population reduction (pBGSK) to obtain the optimized features from the original feature space. The extensive feature selector (EFS) is used to filter out the excessive features based on their ranking. Two text depression datasets collected from Twitter and Reddit forums are used for the evaluation of the proposed feature selection model. The experimentation is carried out using naive Bayes (NB) and support vector machine (SVM) classifiers for five different feature subset sizes (10, 50, 100, 300 and 500). The experimental outcome indicates that the proposed model can achieve superior performance scores. The top results are obtained using the SVM classifier for the SDD dataset with 0.962 accuracy, 0.929 F1 score, 0.0809 log-loss and 0.0717 mean absolute error (MAE). As a result, the optimal combination of features selected by the proposed hybrid model significantly improves the performance of the depression detection system.

A Contemporarymulti–Objective Feature Selection Model for Depression Detection Using a Hybrid pBGSK Optimization Algorithm

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

International Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

Depression is one of the primary causes of global mental illnesses and an underlying reason for suicide. The user generated text content available in social...

A Contemporarymulti–Objective Feature Selection Model for Depression Detection Using a Hybrid pBGSK Optimization Algorithm

Published Online: Mar 29, 2023

Page range: 117 - 131

Received: Mar 06, 2022

Accepted: Jul 03, 2022

DOI: https://doi.org/10.34768/amcs-2023-0010

Keywords
depression detection, text classification, dimensionality reduction, hybrid feature selection, binary gaining-sharing knowledge-based optimization

© 2023 Santhosam Kavi Priya et al., published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

A Contemporarymulti–Objective Feature Selection Model for Depression Detection Using a Hybrid pBGSK Optimization Algorithm

Published Online: Mar 29, 2023

Page range: 117 - 131

Received: Mar 06, 2022

Accepted: Jul 03, 2022

DOI: https://doi.org/10.34768/amcs-2023-0010

Keywordsdepression detection, text classification, dimensionality reduction, hybrid feature selection, binary gaining-sharing knowledge-based optimization

© 2023 Santhosam Kavi Priya et al., published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

Keywords
depression detection, text classification, dimensionality reduction, hybrid feature selection, binary gaining-sharing knowledge-based optimization