MFCC-based Recurrent Neural Network for Automatic Clinical Depression Recognition and Assessment from Speech

MFCC-based Recurrent Neural Network for Automatic Clinical Depression Recognition and Assessment from Speech Emna Rejaibi a,b,c, Ali Komaty d, Fabrice Meriaudeau e, Said Agrebi c, Alice Othmani a a Universit e Paris-Est, LISSI, UPEC, 94400 Vitry sur Seine, France b INSAT Institut National des Sciences Appliqu ees et de T echnologie, Centre Urbain Nord BP 676-1080, Tunis, Tunisie c Y obitrust, T echnopark El Gazala B11 Route de Raoued Km 3.5, 2088 Ariana, Tunisie d University of Sciences and Arts in Lebanon, Ghobeiry, Liban e Universit e de Bourgogne Franche Comt e, ImvIA EA7535/ IFTIM Abstract Major depression, also known as clinical depression, is a constant sense of despair and hopelessness. It is a major mental disorder that can a ff ect people of any age including children and that a ff ect negatively person's personal life, work life, social life and health conditions. Globally, over 300 million people of all ages are estimated to su ff er from clinical depression. A deep recurrent neural network-based framework is presented in this paper to detect depression and to predict its severity level from speech. Low-level and high-level audio features are extracted from audio recordings to predict the 24 scores of the Patient Health Questionnaire (a depression assessment test) and the binary class of depression diagnosis. To overcome the problem of the small size of Speech Depression Recognition (SDR) datasets, data augmentation techniques are used to expand the labeled training set and also transfer learning is performed where the proposed model is trained on a related task and reused as starting point for the proposed model on SDR task. The proposed framework is evaluated on the DAIC-WOZ corpus of the A VEC2017 challenge and promising results are obtained. An overall accuracy of 76.27% with a root mean square error of 0.4 is achieved in assessing depression, while a root mean square error of 0.168 is achieved in predicting the depression severity levels. Introduction Depression is a mental disorder caused by several factors: psychological, social or even physical factors. Psychological factors are related to permanent stress and the inability to successfully cope with di fficult situations. Social factors concern relationship struggles with family or friends and physical factors cover head injuries. Depression describes a loss of interest in every exciting and joyful aspect of everyday life. Mood disorders and mood swings are temporary mental states taking an essential part of daily events, whereas, depression is more permanent and can lead to suicide at its extreme severity levels.