Prediction of anxiety disorders using a feature ensemble based bayesian neural network

Anxiety disorders are common among youth, posing risks to physical and mental health development. Early screening can help identify such disorders and pave the way for preventative treatment. To this end, the Youth Online Diagnostic Assessment (YODA) tool was developed and deployed to predict youth disorders using online screening questionnaires filled by parents. YODA facilitated collection of several novel unique datasets of self-reported anxiety disorder symptoms. Since the data is self-reported and often noisy, feature selection needs to be performed on the raw data to improve accuracy. However, a single set of selected features may not be informative enough. Consequently, in this work we propose and evaluate a novel feature ensemble based Bayesian Neural Network (FE-BNN) that exploits an ensemble of features for improving the accuracy of disorder predictions. We evaluate the performance of FE-BNN on three disorder-specific datasets collected by YODA. Our method achieved the AUC of 0.8683, 0.8769, 0.9091 for the predictions of Separation Anxiety Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Social Anxiety Disorder, respectively. These results provide initial evidence that our method outperforms the original diagnostic scoring function of YODA and several other baseline methods for three anxiety disorders, which can practically help prioritizing diagnostic interviews. Our promising results call for investigation of interpretable methods maintaining high predictive accuracy.