Optimizing Clinical Depression Detection: Extracting Depression-Specific Feature Sets Using spFSR to Enhance Speech-Based Diagnosis

Accurate detection of depression through speech analysis offers a promising non-invasive approach for early diagnosis and intervention. However, the high dimensionality and complexity of speech features present significant challenges in identifying the most relevant features for depression detection. This study applies the spFSR (Feature Selection and Ranking via Simultaneous Perturbation Stochastic Approximation) technique to a comprehensive 2,268-dimensional speech feature set, focusing on selecting features specifically relevant to depression. The effectiveness of the spFSR method is evaluated using two well-known datasets: DAIC-WOZ and CMDC. The selected feature set was assessed across various machine learning models, demonstrating substantial improvements in key performance metrics on both datasets. The results indicate that the spFSR method effectively optimizes feature selection for depression detection, leading to more robust and accurate predictive models across different datasets. Our study find that the top 10 features for effective speech-based depression detection include spectral features (e.g., spectral flux, entropy, flatness), fundamental frequency metrics (e.g., lowest percentile), periodic features (e.g., jitter), and MFCC attributes (e.g., segment length, skewness).