Explainable Multi-class Classification of the CAMH COVID-19 Mental Health Data

Application of Machine Learning algorithms to the medical domain is an emerging trend that helps to advance medical knowledge. At the same time, there is a significant a lack of explainable studies that promote informed, transparent, and interpretable use of Machine Learning algorithms. In this paper, we present explainable multi-class classification of the Covid-19 mental health data. In Machine Learning study, we aim to find the potential factors to influence a personal mental health during the Covid-19 pandemic. We found that Random Forest (RF) and Gradient Boosting (GB) have scored the highest accuracy of 68.08% and 68.19% respectively, with LIME prediction accuracy 65.5% for RF and 61.8% for GB. We then compare a Post-hoc system (Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations, or LIME) and an Ante-hoc system (Gini Importance) in their ability to explain the obtained Machine Learning results. To the best of these authors knowledge, our study is the first explainable Machine Learning study of the mental health data collected during Covid-19 pandemics.