David Hachen

Shikang Liu, David Hachen, Omar Lizardo et al.

Precision medicine has received attention both in and outside the clinic. We focus on the latter, by exploiting the relationship between individuals' social interactions and their mental health to develop a predictive model of one's likelihood to be depressed or anxious from rich dynamic social network data. To our knowledge, we are the first to do this. Existing studies differ from our work in at least one aspect: they do not model social interaction data as a network; they do so but analyze static network data; they examine "correlation" between social networks and health but without developing a predictive model; or they study other individual traits but not mental health. In a systematic and comprehensive evaluation, we show that our predictive model that uses dynamic social network data is superior to its static network as well as non-network equivalents when run on the same data.

Shikang Liu, Fatemeh Vahedian, David Hachen et al.

Depression and anxiety are critical public health issues affecting millions of people around the world. To identify individuals who are vulnerable to depression and anxiety, predictive models have been built that typically utilize data from one source. Unlike these traditional models, in this study, we leverage a rich heterogeneous data set from the University of Notre Dame's NetHealth study that collected individuals' (student participants') social interaction data via smartphones, health-related behavioral data via wearables (Fitbit), and trait data from surveys. To integrate the different types of information, we model the NetHealth data as a heterogeneous information network (HIN). Then, we redefine the problem of predicting individuals' mental health conditions (depression or anxiety) in a novel manner, as applying to our HIN a popular paradigm of a recommender system (RS), which is typically used to predict the preference that a person would give to an item (e.g., a movie or book). In our case, the items are the individuals' different mental health states. We evaluate four state-of-the-art RS approaches. Also, we model the prediction of individuals' mental health as another problem type - that of node classification (NC) in our HIN, evaluating in the process four node features under logistic regression as a proof-of-concept classifier. We find that our RS and NC network methods produce more accurate predictions than a logistic regression model using the same NetHealth data in the traditional non-network fashion as well as a random-approach. Also, we find that the best of the considered RS approaches outperforms all considered NC approaches. This is the first study to integrate smartphone, wearable sensor, and survey data in an HIN manner and use RS or NC on the HIN to predict individuals' mental health conditions.

Louis Faust, Priscilla Jiménez, David Hachen et al.

The rise in popularity of physical activity trackers provides extensive opportunities for research on personal health, however, barriers such as compliance attrition can lead to substantial losses in data. As such, insights into student's compliance habits could support researcher's decisions when designing long-term studies. In this paper, we examined 392 students on a college campus currently two and a half years into an ongoing study. We find that compliance data from as early as one month correlated with student's likelihood of dropping out of the study (p < .001) and compliance long-term (p < .001). The findings in this paper identify long-term compliance habits and the viability of their early detection.