Fusing Location Data for Depression Prediction

Recent studies have demonstrated that geographic location features collected using smartphones can be a powerful predictor for depression. While location information can be conveniently gathered by GPS, typical datasets suffer from significant periods of missing data due to various factors (e.g., phone power dynamics, limitations of GPS). A common approach is to remove the time periods with significant missing data before data analysis. In this paper, we develop an approach that fuses location data collected from two sources: GPS and WiFi association records, on smartphones, and evaluate its performance using a dataset collected from 79 college students. Our evaluation demonstrates that our data fusion approach leads to significantly more complete data. In addition, the features extracted from the more complete data present stronger correlation with self-report depression scores, and lead to depression prediction with much higher F-1 scores (up to 0.76 compared to 0.5 before data fusion). We further investigate the scenario when including an additional data source, i.e., the data collected from a WiFi network infrastructure. Our results show that, while this additional data source leads to even more complete data, the resultant F-1 scores are similar to those when only using the location data (i.e., GPS and WiFi association records) from the phones.

Automated summary

Recent studies have shown that fusing GPS and WiFi data can predict depression more accurately. More complete data leads to stronger correlations and improves the accuracy of depression prediction.