Graph Attention-Based Curriculum Learning for Mental Healthcare Classification

• Published in: IEEE journal of biomedical and health informatics 2024-05, Vol.28 (5), p.2581-2591
• Main Authors: Ahmed, Usman, Lin, Jerry Chun-Wei, Srivastava, Gautam
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Anxiety disorders; Classification; COVID-19; Curricula; Curriculum; curriculum learning; Depression; Depression - classification; Depression - diagnosis; Embedding; Graph learning; healthcare; Humans; Language; Learning; Machine Learning; Medical services; Mental depression; Mental health; Pandemics; Qualitative analysis; Social networking (online); Words (language)
• ISSN: 2168-2194; 2168-2208; 2168-2208
• DOI: 10.1109/JBHI.2023.3274486

Current research has examined the use of user-generated data from online media to identify and diagnose depression as a serious mental health issue that can significantly impact an individual's daily life. To this end, many studies examined words in personal statements to identify depression. In addition to aiding in the diagnosis and treatment of depression, this study uses and utilizes a Graph Attention Network (GAT) model for the classification of depression from online media. The model is based on masked self-attention layers, that assigns different weight to each node in a neighborhood without costly matrix operations. In addition, an emotion lexicon was extended using hypernyms to improve the model performance. Furthermore, embedding of the model was used to illustrate the contribution of the activated words to each symptom and to obtain qualitative agreement from psychiatrists. This technique uses previously learned embedding to illustrate the contribution of activated words to depressive symptoms in online forums. A significant improvement was observed in the model's performance through the use of the lexicon extension method, resulting in an increase in the ROC performance. The performance was also enhanced by an increase in vocabulary and the adoption of a graph-based curriculum. The lexicon expansion method involves the generation of additional words with similar semantic attributes, utilizing similarity metrics to reinforce lexical features. The graph-based curriculum learning also utilized to handle more challenging training samples, allowing the model to develop increasing expertise in learning complex correlations between input data and output labels.