COVID-19 Mental Health Impact Analysis using Ensemble-based Classifier

In the 21^st century, human community witnessed a range of biological crises resulting in long-term consequences like loss of life, economic decline, trauma and social disruptions. COVID -19, named the SARs-CoV-2 virus by United Nations, was a similar outbreak in China in the year 2019, which later spread across the world. During the pandemic, as part of preventive measures, the government authorities introduced SOP (standard operating procedures) measures such as social distancing, lockdown, quarantining and closure of educational institutions imposing a great impact on mental health and well-being of humans, especially among the youth.

A study was performed on a public dataset containing survey records collected from 1182 students of different educational institutions. The survey data was based on age, region of residence, time spent online and health fitness. The method used in the proposed work is a classifier model based on an ensemble of decision trees called random forest to predict the consequences of online learning on student’s health. The optimum and promising features are selected by using Recursive feature elimination (RFE) method.

Our findings reveal a notable enhancement in predicting human health during a pandemic, as indicated by a significant increase in validation accuracy based on confusion for various classifiers. Experimental validation of the developed classifier model is done through the confusion matrix and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. Further, performance metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, specificity, and error rate were employed. The experimental results established the superiority of the proposed ensemble subspace discriminant classifier compared to traditional classifiers.

The RFE feature selection method used in the proposed work helps to select the optimum features as well as more informative features. Moreover, the method employed hyper parameter tuning method to enhance the performance of the classifier model.

This study highlights the importance of taking care of the emotional and physical health of humans during any pandemic. Furthermore, our approach possesses the capacity to significantly influence the field of predicting health, facilitating the development of more effective and advanced prediction strategies in the future.