An attention-based CNN-BiLSTM model for depression detection on social media text

Depression has long been described as a common mental health disorder and a disease with a set of diagnostic criteria that influences the affected individuals' feelings and behavior. The prevalence of Internet use has augmented people's openness to share their experiences and struggles, including mental health disorders on social media thus researchers have tried developing classification models for depression detection using various machine learning and deep learning techniques. In this research, we propose a deep learning architecture with an attention mechanism on CNN-BiLSTM (CBA) and provide a comparative analysis to benchmark well-known deep learning models using the public dataset namely CLEF2017. We found that along with F1 score, precision and recall it is also vital to consider the Area under the curve - Receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC-ROC) and Mathews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) metrics for evaluating depression classification models since the MCC considers all the four values of a confusion matrix. Based on our experiments, the CBA model outperforms the existing state of the art model with an overall accuracy of 96.71% and scores of 0.85 and 0.77 for AUC-ROC and MCC, respectively.