Research Article
Performance Assessment of Certain Machine Learning Models for
Predicting the Major Depressive Disorder among IT
Professionals during Pandemic times
P. M. Durai Raj Vincent ,
1
Nivedhitha Mahendran ,
1
Jamel Nebhen ,
2
N. Deepa ,
1
Kathiravan Srinivasan ,
1
and Yuh-Chung Hu
3
1
School of Information Technology and Engineering, Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT), Vellore 632 014, Tamil Nadu, India
2
Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University, College of Computer Engineering and Sciences, P.O. Box: 151,
Alkharj 11942, Saudi Arabia
3
Department of Mechanical and Electromechanical Engineering, National ILan University, Shenlung Road,
Yilan City 26047, Taiwan
Correspondence should be addressed to Yuh-Chung Hu; ychu@niu.edu.tw
Received 11 March 2021; Revised 26 March 2021; Accepted 9 April 2021; Published 27 April 2021
Academic Editor: Navid Razmjooy
Copyright©2021P.M.DuraiRajVincentetal.isisanopenaccessarticledistributedundertheCreativeCommonsAttribution
License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is
properly cited.
Major depressive disorder (MDD) is the most common mental disorder in the present day as all individuals’ lives, irrespective of
being employed or unemployed, is going through the depression phase at least once in their lifetime. In simple terms, it is a mood
disturbance that can persist for an individual for more than a few weeks to months. In MDD, in most cases, the individuals do not
consult a professional, and even if being consulted, the results are not significant as the individuals find it challenging to identify
whethertheyaredepressedornot.Depression,mostofthetime,cooccurswithanxietyandleadstosuicideinfewcases,amongthe
employees, who are about to handle the pressure at work and home and mostly unnoticing such problems. is is why this work
aims to analyze the ITemployees who are mostly working with targets. e artificial neural network, which is modeled loosely like
the brain, has proved in recent days that it can perform better than most of the classification algorithms. is study has
implemented the multilayered neural perceptron and experimented with the backpropagation technique over the data samples
collected from ITprofessionals. is study aims to develop a model that can classify depressed individuals from those who are not
depressed effectively with the data collected from them manually and through sensors. e results show that deep-MLP with
backpropagation outperforms other machine learning-based models for effective classification.
1. Introduction
In the present day pandemic scenario, where people always
complain about stress, pressure, and anxiety, major de-
pressive disorder is commonly seen as a leading mental
disorder across the globe. When someone appears to have
intense feelings such as sadness and distress for a consid-
erable period, they might have major depressive disorder [1].
It has high impacts on mental and physical activities to the
onesufferingfromit;also,thereisahigherriskofsuicide[2].
ose who have been suffering from MDD tend to feel
uninterested in doing the activities they enjoyed doing once.
Also, it affects their moods and behavior and finds difficulty
in doing day-to-day activities. Most of those who die by
killing themselves are found to have mental disorders that
are treatable, mostly only due to depression they are doing
so. e suicide rate is said to be around 15% among de-
pressed people [3]. Major depressive disorder is a treatable
mental disorder that appears when the individual is too
stressed out because of various reasons of one’s life including
hormonal changes [4].
Major depressive disorder is termed as comorbid [5],
that is, a medical condition that tends to occur, and it is a
tedious task to identify whether the individual is suffering
Hindawi
Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience
Volume 2021, Article ID 9950332, 12 pages
https://doi.org/10.1155/2021/9950332