Machine Learning Model for Depression Prediction during COVID-19 Pandemic

Depression is an unfamous mental health disorder that has affected half the population worldwide. In December 2019, the break of the COVID-19 pandemic was first spotted in Wuhan, China, and later spread to 212 countries and territories worldwide, impacting half the population. It took a significant toll on their physical health and their mental health. Many among the population lost their loved ones, businesses, and being in quarantine for years, completely shifted to the online mode made everyone's life miserable. Many may be dealing with escalated levels of alcohol and drug use, sleeplessness, and an anxious state of mind. So, the need to address this and help the severely affected ones is significant. Self-quarantine also causes additional stress and challenges the mental health of citizens. This paper intends to identify the people who were mentally affected by the pandemic using machine learning techniques. A survey was conducted among college-going students and professionals. The paper used classification techniques such as Naive Bayes, KNN, Random Forest, Logistic Regression, k-fold cross-validation to get results. Support Vector Machine gave the maximum accuracy of 99.35%.