Improving Panic Disorder Classification Using SMOTE and Random Forest

Panic disorder is a serious anxiety disorder that can significantly impact an individual's mental health. If left undetected, this disorder can disrupt daily life, social relationships, and overall quality of life. Early detection and intervention are crucial for managing panic disorder and improving the well-being of those affected. Technology plays a pivotal role in facilitating early detection through data-driven approaches that employ algorithms to identify patterns of behavior or symptoms associated with panic disorder. Accurate classification of panic disorder is crucial for effective diagnosis and treatment. However, machine learning models trained on imbalanced datasets, such as those containing panic disorder patients, are prone to overfitting, leading to poor generalization performance. This study investigates the effectiveness of the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) in addressing overfitting in panic disorder dataset classification using the Random Forest algorithm. The results demonstrate that SMOTE significantly improves the classification performance of Random Forest. By mitigating overfitting and improving generalization to unseen data, SMOTE increases accuracy by 15 percentage points. Before using SMOTE, the accuracy was 82%, and after using SMOTE it is 97%. The findings underscore the promise of SMOTE as a tool for boosting the performance of machine learning algorithms in classifying panic disorder from imbalanced data.