Model Fusion for Multimodal Depression Classification and Level Detection

Audio-visual emotion and mood disorder cues have been recently explored to develop tools to assist psychologists and psychiatrists in evaluating a patient's level of depression. In this paper, we present a number of different multimodal depression level predictors using a model fusion approach, in the context of the AVEC14 challenge. We show that an i-vector based representation for short term audio features contains useful information for depression classification and prediction. We also employed a classification step prior to regression to allow having different regression models depending on the presence or absence of depression. Our experiments show that a combination of our audio-based model and two other models based on the LGBP-TOP video features lead to an improvement of 4% over the baseline model proposed by the challenge organizers.