Application of Machine Learning in Mental Diseases Diagnosis

Mental diseases, mental disorders, or psychological disorders is a large group of symptoms which causes changes to the state of mood and reflect this on the behavior of the person with the mental disorder. It affects the patient’s way of thinking, which limits his ability to perform his simple daily needs, and thus, becomes a burden on the individual, and on the surrounding society as well. There are common types of mental disorders such as depression, anxiety disorders, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder. In this research, two main objectives are considered. The first objective is determining which is the best classifier for predicting a person’s mental disorder among six well-known classifiers. The second objective is determining what is the best feature selection technique to use with mental disorders datasets considering six popular techniques, and with respect to several evaluation metrics. The results revealed that Logistic Regression and Naïve Bayes are the two best classification models, while Info Gain Ratio is the best feature selection method.