Ensemble Feature Selection and Harris Hawks Optimization for Explainable Mental Health Risk Prediction in Female Sex Workers
For mental health practitioners and policymakers, this provides an explainable tool for early risk detection in a marginalized population, though the method is an incremental application of existing techniques.
This paper proposes a hybrid model combining ensemble feature selection and Harris Hawks optimization-tuned logistic regression to predict depression in female sex workers, achieving 95.78% accuracy and 0.96 AUC, identifying key risk factors like post-traumatic stress and client-related violence.
One of the significant mental health issues affecting female sex workers (FSWs) is mental disorders, especially depression. Exposure to violence, stigma, and economic hardship further increases their psychological risk. Current machine learning (ML) models are typically ineffective at capturing the high-dimensional and complex risk patterns that exist in this marginalized group. This paper suggests a hybrid predictive model that merges an ensemble feature selection strategy using ANOVA and mutual information and Harris Hawks optimization-tuned logistic regression and represents a new application of swarm intelligence to predict mental health in vulnerable groups. The explainable AI (XAI) methods can be used to understand the factors of trauma associated with model predictions. When applied to a group of 3,005 FSWs, it can be seen that the proposed model is more effective than traditional classifiers, with an accuracy of 95.78%, an F1 score of 95.77%, and an AUC of 0.96, and identifying post-traumatic stress, client-related violence, and occupational factors as major contributors to depression. This work bridges the gaps between conventional and ML approaches to develop an XAI tool that enables vulnerable groups to receive early assistance, evidence-based targeted psychosocial care, and health planning.