New chaos-integrated improved grey wolf optimization based models for automatic detection of depression in online social media and networks

Abstract

Depression is a psychological effect of the modern lifestyle on people's thoughts. It is a serious individual and social health problem due to the risk of suicide and loss of workforce, high chronicity, recurrence rates, and prevalence. Therefore, identification, prevention, treatment of depression, and determination of relapse risk factors are of great importance. Depression has traditionally been diagnosed using standardized scales that require clinical diagnoses or patients' subjective responses. However, these classical techniques have some limitations such as cost, uncomfortability, subjectivity, and ineffectiveness. Social media data can be simply and efficiently used for depression detection because it allows instantaneous emotional expression and quick access to various information. Some machine learning-based methods are used for detecting the depression in online social media and networks. Nevertheless, these algorithms suffer from several drawbacks, including data sparsity, dimension explosion, restricted capacity for generalization, and low performance on imbalanced data sets. Furthermore, many machine learning methods work as black-box models, and the constructed depression detection models are not interpretable and explainable. Intelligent meta-heuristic optimization algorithms are widely used for different types of complex real-world problems due to their simplicity and high performance. It is aimed to remove the limitations of studies on this problem by increasing the success rate and automatically selecting the relevant features and integrating the explainability. In this study, new chaos-integrated multi-objective optimization algorithms are proposed to increase efficiency. New improved Grey Wolf Optimization algorithms have been proposed by integrating Circle, Logistic, and Iterative chaotic maps into the improved Grey Wolf Optimization algorithm. It is aimed to increase the success rate by proposing a multi-objective fitness function that can optimize the accuracy and the number of features simultaneously. The proposed algorithms are compared with different types of popular supervised machine learning algorithms and current metaheuristic algorithms that are widely and successfully used in depression detection problems. Experimental results show that the proposed models outperform machine learning methods, as evidenced by examining results with accuracy, F-measure, MCC, sensitivity, and precision measures. An accuracy value of 100% was obtained from proposed algorithms. In addition, when the confusion matrices are examined, it is seen that they exhibit a successful distribution. Although it is a new research and application area for optimization theory, promising results have been obtained from the proposed models.