Multimodal Data Fusion for Depression Detection Approach

Depression is one of the most common mental health disorders in the world, affecting millions of people. Early detection of depression is crucial for effective medical intervention. Multimodal networks can greatly assist in the detection of depression, especially in situations where in patients are not always aware of or able to express their symptoms. By analyzing text and audio data, such networks are able to automatically identify patterns in speech and behavior that indicate a depressive state. In this study, we propose two multimodal information fusion networks: early and late fusion. These networks were developed using convolutional neural network (CNN) layers to learn local patterns, a bidirectional LSTM (Bi-LSTM) to process sequences, and a self-attention mechanism to improve focus on key parts of the data. The DAIC-WOZ and EDAIC-WOZ datasets were used for the experiments. The experiments compared the precision, recall, f1-score, and accuracy metrics for the cases of using early and late multimodal data fusion and found that the early information fusion multimodal network achieved higher classification accuracy results. On the test dataset, this network achieved an f1-score of 0.79 and an overall classification accuracy of 0.86, indicating its effectiveness in detecting depression.