Abraham Nunes

Sri Harsha Dumpala, Katerina Dikaios, Abraham Nunes et al.

Depression, a prevalent mental health disorder impacting millions globally, demands reliable assessment systems. Unlike previous studies that focus solely on either detecting depression or predicting its severity, our work identifies individual symptoms of depression while also predicting its severity using speech input. We leverage self-supervised learning (SSL)-based speech models to better utilize the small-sized datasets that are frequently encountered in this task. Our study demonstrates notable performance improvements by utilizing SSL embeddings compared to conventional speech features. We compare various types of SSL pretrained models to elucidate the type of speech information (semantic, speaker, or prosodic) that contributes the most in identifying different symptoms. Additionally, we evaluate the impact of combining multiple SSL embeddings on performance. Furthermore, we show the significance of multi-task learning for identifying depressive symptoms effectively.

Abraham Nunes, Martin Alda, Timothy Bardouille et al.

A discrete system's heterogeneity is measured by the Rényi heterogeneity family of indices (also known as Hill numbers or Hannah--Kay indices), whose units are {the numbers equivalent}. Unfortunately, numbers equivalent heterogeneity measures for non-categorical data require {a priori} (A) categorical partitioning and (B) pairwise distance measurement on the observable data space, thereby precluding application to problems with ill-defined categories or where semantically relevant features must be learned as abstractions from some data. We thus introduce representational Rényi heterogeneity (RRH), which transforms an observable domain onto a latent space upon which the Rényi heterogeneity is both tractable and semantically relevant. This method requires neither {a priori} binning nor definition of a distance function on the observable space. We show that RRH can generalize existing biodiversity and economic equality indices. Compared with existing indices on a beta-mixture distribution, we show that RRH responds more appropriately to changes in mixture component separation and weighting. Finally, we demonstrate the measurement of RRH in a set of natural images, with respect to abstract representations learned by a deep neural network. The RRH approach will further enable heterogeneity measurement in disciplines whose data do not easily conform to the assumptions of existing indices.

Abraham Nunes, Alexander Rudiuk

Psychiatric neuroscience is increasingly aware of the need to define psychopathology in terms of abnormal neural computation. The central tool in this endeavour is the fitting of computational models to behavioural data. The most prominent example of this procedure is fitting reinforcement learning (RL) models to decision-making data collected from mentally ill and healthy subject populations. These models are generative models of the decision-making data themselves, and the parameters we seek to infer can be psychologically and neurobiologically meaningful. Currently, the gold standard approach to this inference procedure involves Monte-Carlo sampling, which is robust but computationally intensive---rendering additional procedures, such as cross-validation, impractical. Searching for point estimates of model parameters using optimization procedures remains a popular and interesting option. On a novel testbed simulating parameter estimation from a common RL task, we investigated the effects of smooth vs. boundary constraints on parameter estimation using interior point and deterministic direct search algorithms for optimization. Ultimately, we show that the use of boundary constraints can lead to substantial truncation effects. Our results discourage the use of boundary constraints for these applications.