Preprint Article Version 1 Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed

An Explainable Machine Learning Approach for COVID-19 Impact on Mood State of Children and Adolescents during the 1st Lockdown in Greece

Charis Ntakolia
* ORCID logo ,
Dimitrios Priftis
ORCID logo ,
Mariana Charakopoulou-Travlou
,
Ioanna Rannou
,
Konstantina Magklara
,
Ioanna Giannopoulou
,
Konstantinos Kotsis
ORCID logo ,
Aspasia Serdari
,
Emmanouil Tsalamanios
,
Aliki Grigoriadou
,
Konstantina Ladopoulou
,
Iouliani Koullourou
,
Neda Sadeghi
,
Georgia O’Callaghan
,
Argyris Stringaris
,
Eleni Lazaratou
Version 1 : Received: 13 December 2021 / Approved: 22 December 2021 / Online: 22 December 2021 (16:21:19 CET)

A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.

Ntakolia, C.; Priftis, D.; Charakopoulou-Travlou, M.; Rannou, I.; Magklara, K.; Giannopoulou, I.; Kotsis, K.; Serdari, A.; Tsalamanios, E.; Grigoriadou, A.; Ladopoulou, K.; Koullourou, I.; Sadeghi, N.; O’Callaghan, G.; Stringaris, A.; Lazaratou, E. An Explainable Machine Learning Approach for COVID-19’s Impact on Mood States of Children and Adolescents during the First Lockdown in Greece. Healthcare 2022, 10, 149. Ntakolia, C.; Priftis, D.; Charakopoulou-Travlou, M.; Rannou, I.; Magklara, K.; Giannopoulou, I.; Kotsis, K.; Serdari, A.; Tsalamanios, E.; Grigoriadou, A.; Ladopoulou, K.; Koullourou, I.; Sadeghi, N.; O’Callaghan, G.; Stringaris, A.; Lazaratou, E. An Explainable Machine Learning Approach for COVID-19’s Impact on Mood States of Children and Adolescents during the First Lockdown in Greece. Healthcare 2022, 10, 149.

Abstract

The global spread of COVID-19 led the World Health Organization to declare a pandemic on 11 March 2020. To decelerate this spread, countries have taken strict measures that affected the lifestyle and economy. Various studies have been focused on the identification of COVID-19 impact to mental health of children and adolescents via traditional statistical approaches. However, a machine learning methodology must be developed to explain the main factors that contribute to the change of mood state of children and adolescents during the first lockdown. Therefore, to this study an explainable machine learning pipeline is presented focusing on children and adolescents in Greece, where a strict lockdown was imposed. The target group consists of children and adolescents, recruited from children and adolescent mental health services, who present mental health problems diagnosed before the pandemic. The proposed methodology imposes: (i) data collection via questionnaires; (ii) a clustering process to identify the groups of subjects with amelioration, deterioration and stability to their mood state; (iii) a feature selection process to identify the most informative features that contribute to mood state prediction; (iv) a decision-making process based on an experimental evaluation among classifiers; (v) calibration of the best performing model and (v) a post-hoc interpretation of the features’ impact on the best performing model. The results showed that a blend of heterogeneous features from almost all feature categories is necessary to increase our understanding regarding the effect of COVID-19 pandemic on the mood state of children and adolescents.

Keywords

COVID-19 pandemic; children and adolescents; machine learning; post-hoc explainability; model calibration

Subject

Medicine and Pharmacology, Psychiatry and Mental Health

Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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