Machine learning for psychological disorder prediction in Indians during COVID-19 nationwide lockdown

Abstract

As the world combats with the outrageous and perilous novel coronavirus, national lockdown has been enforced in most of the countries. It is necessary for public health but on the flip side it is detrimental for people’s mental health. While the psychological repercussions are predictable during the period of COVID-19 lockdown but this enforcement can lead to long-term behavioral changes post lockdown too. Moreover, the detection of psychological effects may take months or years. This mental health crisis situation requires timely, pro-active intervention to cope and persevere the Coro-anxiety (Corona-related). To address this gap, this research firstly studies the psychological burden among Indians using a COVID-19 Mental Health Questionnaire and then does a predictive analytics using machine learning to identify the likelihood of mental health outcomes using learned features of 395 Indian participants. The proposed Psychological Disorder Prediction (PDP) tool uses a multinomial Naïve Bayes classifier to train the model to detect the onset of specific psychological disorder and classify the participants into two pre-defined categories, namely, anxiety disorder and mood disorder. Experimental evaluation reports a classification accuracy of 92.15%. This automation plays a pivotal role in clinical support as it aims to suggest individuals who may need psychological help.