Realizing an integrated multistage support vector machine model for augmented recognition of unipolar depression

Unipolar depression (UD), also referred to as clinical depression, appears to be a widespread mental disorder around the world. Further, this is a vital state related to a person’s health that influences his/her daily routine. Besides, this state also influences the person’s frame of mind, behavior, and several body functionalities like sleep, appetite, and also it can cause a scenario where a person could harm himself/herself or others. In several cases, it becomes an arduous task to detect UD, since, it is a state of comorbidity. For that reason, this research proposes a more convenient approach for the physicians to detect the state of clinical depression at an initial phase using an integrated multistage support vector machine model. Initially, the dataset is preprocessed using multiple imputation by chained equations (MICE) technique. Then, for selecting the appropriate features, the support vector machine-based recursive feature elimination (SVM RFE) is deployed. Subsequently, the integrated multistage support vector machine classifier is built by employing the bagging random sampling technique. Finally, the experimental outcomes indicate that the proposed integrated multistage support vector machine model surpasses methods such as logistic regression, multilayer perceptron, random forest, and bagging SVM (majority voting), in terms of overall performance.