Predicting Depression and Anxiety: A Multi-Layer Perceptron for Analyzing the Mental Health Impact of COVID-19
This work addresses mental health prediction during a global crisis for public health and clinical applications, but it is incremental as it applies an existing ML method to new pandemic-specific data.
The researchers tackled predicting anxiety and depression trends during the COVID-19 pandemic using a multi-layer perceptron called CoDAP, analyzing weekly mental health data from U.S. adults over ten weeks in 2020, and the model provided insights into demographic and social factors affecting mental health.
We introduce a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) called the COVID-19 Depression and Anxiety Predictor (CoDAP) to predict mental health trends, particularly anxiety and depression, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our method utilizes a comprehensive dataset, which tracked mental health symptoms weekly over ten weeks during the initial COVID-19 wave (April to June 2020) in a diverse cohort of U.S. adults. This period, characterized by a surge in mental health symptoms and conditions, offers a critical context for our analysis. Our focus was to extract and analyze patterns of anxiety and depression through a unique lens of qualitative individual attributes using CoDAP. This model not only predicts patterns of anxiety and depression during the pandemic but also unveils key insights into the interplay of demographic factors, behavioral changes, and social determinants of mental health. These findings contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the complexity of mental health issues in times of global health crises, potentially guiding future early interventions.