Early detection of occupational stress: Enhancing workplace safety with machine learning and large language models

Occupational stress is a major concern for employers and organizations as it compromises decision-making and overall safety of workers. Studies indicate that work-stress contributes to severe mental strain, increased accident rates, and in extreme cases, even suicides. This study aims to enhance early detection of occupational stress through machine learning (ML) methods, providing stakeholders with better insights into the underlying causes of stress to improve occupational safety. Utilizing a newly published workplace survey dataset, we developed a novel feature selection pipeline identifying 39 key indicators of work-stress. An ensemble of three ML models achieved a state-of-the-art accuracy of 90.32%, surpassing existing studies. The framework's generalizability was confirmed through a three-step validation technique: holdout-validation, 10-fold cross-validation, and external-validation with synthetic data generation, achieving an accuracy of 89% on unseen data. We also introduced a 1D-CNN to enable hierarchical and temporal learning from the data. Additionally, we created an algorithm to convert tabular data into texts with 100% information retention, facilitating domain analysis with large language models, revealing that occupational stress is more closely related to the biomedical domain than clinical or generalist domains. Ablation studies reinforced our feature selection pipeline, and revealed sociodemographic features as the most important. Explainable AI techniques identified excessive workload and ambiguity (27%), poor communication (17%), and a positive work environment (16%) as key stress factors. Unlike previous studies relying on clinical settings or biomarkers, our approach streamlines stress detection from simple survey questions, offering a real-time, deployable tool for periodic stress assessment in workplaces.