You are all cordially invited to the Master Thesis defence on the 27th of October at 11 a.m. CEST

• in person at the Institute of Computer Science: room 302, Neubrückstrasse 10, 3012 Bern
• via Zoom (passcode is 327699).

Abstract

Depression is the second major cause for years spent in disability and has a growing prevalence in adolescents. The recent Covid-19 pandemic has intensified the situation and limited in-person patient monitoring due to distancing measures. Recent advances in wearable devices have made it possible to record the rest/activity cycle remotely with high precision and in real-world contexts. We aim to use machine learning methods to predict an individual's mental health based on wearable-measured sleep and physical activity. Predicting an impending mental health crisis of an adolescent allows for prompt intervention,  detection of depression onset or its recursion, and remote monitoring. To achieve this goal, we train three primary forecasting models; linear regression, random forest, and light gradient boosted machine (LightGBM); and two deep learning models; block recurrent neural network (block RNN) and temporal convolutional network (TCN); on Actigraph measurements to forecast mental health in terms of depression, anxiety, sleepiness, stress, sleep quality, and behavioural problems. Our models achieve a high forecasting performance, the random forest being the winner to reach an accuracy of 98% for forecasting the trait anxiety. We perform extensive experiments to evaluate the models' performance in accuracy, generalization, and feature utilization, using a naive forecaster as the baseline. Our analysis shows minimal mental health changes over two months, making the prediction task easily achievable. Due to these minimal changes in mental health, the models tend to primarily use the historical values of mental health evaluation instead of Actigraph features. At the time of this master thesis, the data acquisition step is still in progress. In future work, we plan to train the models on the complete dataset using a longer forecasting horizon to increase the level of mental health changes and perform transfer learning to compensate for the small dataset size. This interdisciplinary project demonstrates the opportunities and challenges in machine learning-based prediction of mental health, paving the way toward using the same techniques to forecast other mental disorders such as internalizing disorder, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, etc. and improving the quality of life for individuals who have some mental disorder.