# Detecting the Severity of Major Depressive Disorder from Speech: A Novel HARD-Training Methodology

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.01542 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01542/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [Super-Convergence: Very Fast Training of Neural Networks Using Large Learning Rates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07120/) (2017)
- [State-of-the-art Speech Recognition With Sequence-to-Sequence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01769/) (2017)
- [Active Bias: Training More Accurate Neural Networks by Emphasizing High Variance Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07433/) (2017)
- [Non-convex Optimization for Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07897/) (2017)
- [AVEC 2019 Workshop and Challenge: State-of-Mind, Detecting Depression with AI, and Cross-Cultural Affect Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11510/) (2019)
- [MFCC-based Recurrent Neural Network for Automatic Clinical Depression Recognition and Assessment from Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07208/) (2019)
- [Curriculum Learning for Speech Emotion Recognition from Crowdsourced Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10339/) (2018)
- [AudVowelConsNet: A Phoneme-Level Based Deep CNN Architecture for Clinical Depression Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.16201/) (2020)
- [Towards Robust Deep Neural Networks for Affect and Depression Recognition from Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00310/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a common worldwide mental health issue with high associated socioeconomic costs. The prediction and automatic detection of MDD can, therefore, make a huge impact on society. Speech, as a non-invasive, easy to collect signal, is a promising marker to aid the diagnosis and assessment of MDD. In this regard, speech samples were collected as part of the Remote Assessment of Disease and Relapse in Major Depressive Disorder (RADAR-MDD) research programme. RADAR-MDD was an observational cohort study in which speech and other digital biomarkers were collected from a cohort of individuals with a history of MDD in Spain, United Kingdom and the Netherlands. In this paper, the RADAR-MDD speech corpus was taken as an experimental framework to test the efficacy of a Sequence-to-Sequence model with a local attention mechanism in a two-class depression severity classification paradigm. Additionally, a novel training method, HARD-Training, is proposed. It is a methodology based on the selection of more ambiguous samples for the model training, and inspired by the curriculum learning paradigm. HARD-Training was found to consistently improve - with an average increment of 8.6% - the performance of our classifiers for both of two speech elicitation tasks used and each collection site of the RADAR-MDD speech corpus. With this novel methodology, our Sequence-to-Sequence model was able to effectively detect MDD severity regardless of language. Finally, recognising the need for greater awareness of potential algorithmic bias, we conduct an additional analysis of our results separately for each gender.