DAC Stacking: A Deep Learning Ensemble to Classify Anxiety, Depression, and Their Comorbidity From Reddit Texts

Depression is the most incapacitating disease worldwide, and it has an alarming comorbidity rate with anxiety. The use of social networks to expose personal difficulties has enabled works on the automatic identification of specific mental conditions, particularly depression. In spite of many solutions proposed for the automatic recognition of depression, fewer exist for anxiety and its comorbidity with depression. In this paper, we propose DAC Stacking, a solution that leverages stacking ensembles and Deep Learning (DL) to automatically identify depression, anxiety, and their comorbidity, using data extracted from Reddit. The stacking is composed of single-label binary classifiers, that either distinguish between specific disorders and control users (experts), or between pairs of target conditions (differentiating). A meta-learner explores these base classifiers as a context for reaching a multi-label decision. We assessed alternative ensemble topologies, exploring roles for base models, DL architectures, and word embeddings. All base classifiers and ensembles outperformed the baselines for depression and anxiety (f-measures near 0.79). The ensemble topology with the best performance (Hamming Loss of 0.29 and Exact Match Ratio of 0.46) combines base classifiers of three DL architectures, and includes expert and differentiating base models. The analysis of the influential classification features according to SHAP revealed the strengths of our solution and provided insights on the challenges for the automatic classification of the addressed mental conditions.