Machine Learning for Stress Detection: A LightGBM-Based Approach Using Bayesian Optimization

Stress is an important physiological and psychological reaction which, when prolonged, has a negative impact on the health and well-being of humans. Traditional stress assessment methods tend to be subjective and are not scalable in real-time. In this research, a lightweight machine learning framework to predict stress from easily measurable environmental and activity-related features, temperature, humidity, and steps, is introduced. The proposed method is different from the approach that depends on complex physiological signals and uses minimal non-invasive inputs that can be applied in the wearable and IoT field. The stress level is considered as the target variable, and all the features used as input variables are independent from each other to prevent data leakage. There are several machine learning and deep learning models and their performances are measured, such as LightGBM, Support vector machine (SVM), AdaBoost, Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU). Bayesian hyperparameter optimization is used to improve the performance of the model and guarantee strong generalization. Experimental results show that LightGBM outperforms the other models, giving an accuracy of 97% and a balanced precision, recall and F1 score of 95%. The results demonstrate promising predictive performance on the evaluated dataset. However, since the model was validated on a relatively small publicly available dataset, further evaluation using larger and more diverse real-world datasets is required before practical deployment.