On the Validity of Head Motion Patterns as Generalisable Depression Biomarkers

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Gahalawat, Monika, Bilalpur, Maneesh, Rojas, Raul Fernandez, Cohn, Jeffrey F., Goecke, Roland, Subramanian, Ramanathan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866910973752770560
author Gahalawat, Monika
Bilalpur, Maneesh
Rojas, Raul Fernandez
Cohn, Jeffrey F.
Goecke, Roland
Subramanian, Ramanathan
author_facet Gahalawat, Monika
Bilalpur, Maneesh
Rojas, Raul Fernandez
Cohn, Jeffrey F.
Goecke, Roland
Subramanian, Ramanathan
contents Depression is a debilitating mood disorder negatively impacting millions worldwide. While researchers have explored multiple verbal and non-verbal behavioural cues for automated depression assessment, head motion has received little attention thus far. Further, the common practice of validating machine learning models via a single dataset can limit model generalisability. This work examines the effectiveness and generalisability of models utilising elementary head motion units, termed kinemes, for depression severity estimation. Specifically, we consider three depression datasets from different western cultures (German: AVEC2013, Australian: Blackdog and American: Pitt datasets) with varied contextual and recording settings to investigate the generalisability of the derived kineme patterns via two methods: (i) k-fold cross-validation over individual/multiple datasets, and (ii) model reuse on other datasets. Evaluating classification and regression performance with classical machine learning methods, our results show that: (1) head motion patterns are efficient biomarkers for estimating depression severity, achieving highly competitive performance for both classification and regression tasks on a variety of datasets, including achieving the second best Mean Absolute Error (MAE) on the AVEC2013 dataset, and (2) kineme-based features are more generalisable than (a) raw head motion descriptors for binary severity classification, and (b) other visual behavioural cues for severity estimation (regression).
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_23427
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the Validity of Head Motion Patterns as Generalisable Depression Biomarkers
Gahalawat, Monika
Bilalpur, Maneesh
Rojas, Raul Fernandez
Cohn, Jeffrey F.
Goecke, Roland
Subramanian, Ramanathan
Machine Learning
Depression is a debilitating mood disorder negatively impacting millions worldwide. While researchers have explored multiple verbal and non-verbal behavioural cues for automated depression assessment, head motion has received little attention thus far. Further, the common practice of validating machine learning models via a single dataset can limit model generalisability. This work examines the effectiveness and generalisability of models utilising elementary head motion units, termed kinemes, for depression severity estimation. Specifically, we consider three depression datasets from different western cultures (German: AVEC2013, Australian: Blackdog and American: Pitt datasets) with varied contextual and recording settings to investigate the generalisability of the derived kineme patterns via two methods: (i) k-fold cross-validation over individual/multiple datasets, and (ii) model reuse on other datasets. Evaluating classification and regression performance with classical machine learning methods, our results show that: (1) head motion patterns are efficient biomarkers for estimating depression severity, achieving highly competitive performance for both classification and regression tasks on a variety of datasets, including achieving the second best Mean Absolute Error (MAE) on the AVEC2013 dataset, and (2) kineme-based features are more generalisable than (a) raw head motion descriptors for binary severity classification, and (b) other visual behavioural cues for severity estimation (regression).
title On the Validity of Head Motion Patterns as Generalisable Depression Biomarkers
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23427