Research Area:  Machine Learning

Abstract:

The ability to explain why the model produced results in such a way is an important problem, especially in the medical domain. Model explainability is important for building trust by providing insight into the model prediction. However, most existing machine learning methods provide no explainability, which is worrying. For instance, in the task of automatic depression prediction, most machine learning models lead to predictions that are obscure to humans. In this work, we propose explainable Multi-Aspect Depression Detection with Hierarchical Attention Network MDHAN, for automatic detection of depressed users on social media and explain the model prediction. We have considered user posts augmented with additional features from Twitter. Specifically, we encode user posts using two levels of attention mechanisms applied at the tweet-level and word-level, calculate each tweet and words importance, and capture semantic sequence features from the user timelines (posts). Our hierarchical attention model is developed in such a way that it can capture patterns that leads to explainable results. Our experiments show that MDHAN outperforms several popular and robust baseline methods, demonstrating the effectiveness of combining deep learning with multi-aspect features. We also show that our model helps improve predictive performance when detecting depression in users who are posting messages publicly on social media. MDHAN achieves excellent performance and ensures adequate evidence to explain the prediction.

Keywords:  
Depression detection
Social network
Deep learning
Machine learning
Explainability

Author(s) Name:  Hamad Zogan, Imran Razzak, Xianzhi Wang, Shoaib Jameel & Guandong Xu

Publisher name:  Springer

DOI:  10.1007/s11280-021-00992-2

Volume Information:  

Paper Link:   https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11280-021-00992-2