Predicting Depression and Anxiety: A Multi-Layer Perceptron for Analyzing the Mental Health Impact of COVID-19

We introduce a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) called the COVID-19 Depression and Anxiety Predictor (CoDAP) to predict mental health trends, particularly anxiety and depression, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our method utilizes a comprehensive dataset, which tracked mental health symptoms weekly over ten weeks during the initial COVID-19 wave (April to June 2020) in a diverse cohort of U.S. adults. This period, characterized by a surge in mental health symptoms and conditions, offers a critical context for our analysis. Our focus was to extract and analyze patterns of anxiety and depression through a unique lens of qualitative individual attributes using CoDAP. This model not only predicts patterns of anxiety and depression during the pandemic but also unveils key insights into the interplay of demographic factors, behavioral changes, and social determinants of mental health. These findings contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the complexity of mental health issues in times of global health crises, potentially guiding future early interventions.

Trust, Accountability, and Autonomy in Knowledge Graph-based AI for Self-determination

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have emerged as fundamental platforms for powering intelligent decision-making and a wide range of Artificial Intelligence (AI) services across major corporations such as Google, Walmart, and AirBnb. KGs complement Machine Learning (ML) algorithms by providing data context and semantics, thereby enabling further inference and question-answering capabilities. The integration of KGs with neuronal learning (e.g., Large Language Models (LLMs)) is currently a topic of active research, commonly named neuro-symbolic AI. Despite the numerous benefits that can be accomplished with KG-based AI, its growing ubiquity within online services may result in the loss of self-determination for citizens as a fundamental societal issue. The more we rely on these technologies, which are often centralised, the less citizens will be able to determine their own destinies. To counter this threat, AI regulation, such as the European Union (EU) AI Act, is being proposed in certain regions. The regulation sets what technologists need to do, leading to questions concerning: How can the output of AI systems be trusted? What is needed to ensure that the data fuelling and the inner workings of these artefacts are transparent? How can AI be made accountable for its decision-making? This paper conceptualises the foundational topics and research pillars to support KG-based AI for self-determination. Drawing upon this conceptual framework, challenges and opportunities for citizen self-determination are illustrated and analysed in a real-world scenario. As a result, we propose a research agenda aimed at accomplishing the recommended objectives.

LLM-augmented Preference Learning from Natural Language

Finding preferences expressed in natural language is an important but challenging task. State-of-the-art(SotA) methods leverage transformer-based models such as BERT, RoBERTa, etc. and graph neural architectures such as graph attention networks. Since Large Language Models (LLMs) are equipped to deal with larger context lengths and have much larger model sizes than the transformer-based model, we investigate their ability to classify comparative text directly. This work aims to serve as a first step towards using LLMs for the CPC task. We design and conduct a set of experiments that format the classification task into an input prompt for the LLM and a methodology to get a fixed-format response that can be automatically evaluated. Comparing performances with existing methods, we see that pre-trained LLMs are able to outperform the previous SotA models with no fine-tuning involved. Our results show that the LLMs can consistently outperform the SotA when the target text is large -- i.e. composed of multiple sentences --, and are still comparable to the SotA performance in shorter text. We also find that few-shot learning yields better performance than zero-shot learning.

PredictChain: Empowering Collaboration and Data Accessibility for AI in a Decentralized Blockchain-based Marketplace

Limited access to computing resources and training data poses significant challenges for individuals and groups aiming to train and utilize predictive machine learning models. Although numerous publicly available machine learning models exist, they are often unhosted, necessitating end-users to establish their computational infrastructure. Alternatively, these models may only be accessible through paid cloud-based mechanisms, which can prove costly for general public utilization. Moreover, model and data providers require a more streamlined approach to track resource usage and capitalize on subsequent usage by others, both financially and otherwise. An effective mechanism is also lacking to contribute high-quality data for improving model performance. We propose a blockchain-based marketplace called "PredictChain" for predictive machine-learning models to address these issues. This marketplace enables users to upload datasets for training predictive machine learning models, request model training on previously uploaded datasets, or submit queries to trained models. Nodes within the blockchain network, equipped with available computing resources, will operate these models, offering a range of archetype machine learning models with varying characteristics, such as cost, speed, simplicity, power, and cost-effectiveness. This decentralized approach empowers users to develop improved models accessible to the public, promotes data sharing, and reduces reliance on centralized cloud providers.

MentalHealthAI: Utilizing Personal Health Device Data to Optimize Psychiatry Treatment

Mental health disorders remain a significant challenge in modern healthcare, with diagnosis and treatment often relying on subjective patient descriptions and past medical history. To address this issue, we propose a personalized mental health tracking and mood prediction system that utilizes patient physiological data collected through personal health devices. Our system leverages a decentralized learning mechanism that combines transfer and federated machine learning concepts using smart contracts, allowing data to remain on users' devices and enabling effective tracking of mental health conditions for psychiatric treatment and management in a privacy-aware and accountable manner. We evaluate our model using a popular mental health dataset that demonstrates promising results. By utilizing connected health systems and machine learning models, our approach offers a novel solution to the challenge of providing psychiatrists with further insight into their patients' mental health outside of traditional office visits.

Informing clinical assessment by contextualizing post-hoc explanations of risk prediction models in type-2 diabetes

Medical experts may use Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems with greater trust if these are supported by contextual explanations that let the practitioner connect system inferences to their context of use. However, their importance in improving model usage and understanding has not been extensively studied. Hence, we consider a comorbidity risk prediction scenario and focus on contexts regarding the patients clinical state, AI predictions about their risk of complications, and algorithmic explanations supporting the predictions. We explore how relevant information for such dimensions can be extracted from Medical guidelines to answer typical questions from clinical practitioners. We identify this as a question answering (QA) task and employ several state-of-the-art LLMs to present contexts around risk prediction model inferences and evaluate their acceptability. Finally, we study the benefits of contextual explanations by building an end-to-end AI pipeline including data cohorting, AI risk modeling, post-hoc model explanations, and prototyped a visual dashboard to present the combined insights from different context dimensions and data sources, while predicting and identifying the drivers of risk of Chronic Kidney Disease - a common type-2 diabetes comorbidity. All of these steps were performed in engagement with medical experts, including a final evaluation of the dashboard results by an expert medical panel. We show that LLMs, in particular BERT and SciBERT, can be readily deployed to extract some relevant explanations to support clinical usage. To understand the value-add of the contextual explanations, the expert panel evaluated these regarding actionable insights in the relevant clinical setting. Overall, our paper is one of the first end-to-end analyses identifying the feasibility and benefits of contextual explanations in a real-world clinical use case.

Leveraging Clinical Context for User-Centered Explainability: A Diabetes Use Case

Academic advances of AI models in high-precision domains, like healthcare, need to be made explainable in order to enhance real-world adoption. Our past studies and ongoing interactions indicate that medical experts can use AI systems with greater trust if there are ways to connect the model inferences about patients to explanations that are tied back to the context of use. Specifically, risk prediction is a complex problem of diagnostic and interventional importance to clinicians wherein they consult different sources to make decisions. To enable the adoption of the ever improving AI risk prediction models in practice, we have begun to explore techniques to contextualize such models along three dimensions of interest: the patients' clinical state, AI predictions about their risk of complications, and algorithmic explanations supporting the predictions. We validate the importance of these dimensions by implementing a proof-of-concept (POC) in type-2 diabetes (T2DM) use case where we assess the risk of chronic kidney disease (CKD) - a common T2DM comorbidity. Within the POC, we include risk prediction models for CKD, post-hoc explainers of the predictions, and other natural-language modules which operationalize domain knowledge and CPGs to provide context. With primary care physicians (PCP) as our end-users, we present our initial results and clinician feedback in this paper. Our POC approach covers multiple knowledge sources and clinical scenarios, blends knowledge to explain data and predictions to PCPs, and received an enthusiastic response from our medical expert.

Semantic Modeling for Food Recommendation Explanations

With the increased use of AI methods to provide recommendations in the health, specifically in the food dietary recommendation space, there is also an increased need for explainability of those recommendations. Such explanations would benefit users of recommendation systems by empowering them with justifications for following the system's suggestions. We present the Food Explanation Ontology (FEO) that provides a formalism for modeling explanations to users for food-related recommendations. FEO models food recommendations, using concepts from the explanation domain to create responses to user questions about food recommendations they receive from AI systems such as personalized knowledge base question answering systems. FEO uses a modular, extensible structure that lends itself to a variety of explanations while still preserving important semantic details to accurately represent explanations of food recommendations. In order to evaluate this system, we used a set of competency questions derived from explanation types present in literature that are relevant to food recommendations. Our motivation with the use of FEO is to empower users to make decisions about their health, fully equipped with an understanding of the AI recommender systems as they relate to user questions, by providing reasoning behind their recommendations in the form of explanations.

Applying Personal Knowledge Graphs to Health

Knowledge graphs that encapsulate personal health information, or personal health knowledge graphs (PHKG), can help enable personalized health care in knowledge-driven systems. In this paper we provide a short survey of existing work surrounding the emerging paradigm of PHKGs and highlight the major challenges that remain. We find that while some preliminary exploration exists on the topic of personal knowledge graphs, development of PHKGs remains under-explored. A range of challenges surrounding the collection, linkage, and maintenance of personal health knowledge remains to be addressed to fully realize PHKGs.

Explanation Ontology: A Model of Explanations for User-Centered AI

Explainability has been a goal for Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems since their conception, with the need for explainability growing as more complex AI models are increasingly used in critical, high-stakes settings such as healthcare. Explanations have often added to an AI system in a non-principled, post-hoc manner. With greater adoption of these systems and emphasis on user-centric explainability, there is a need for a structured representation that treats explainability as a primary consideration, mapping end user needs to specific explanation types and the system's AI capabilities. We design an explanation ontology to model both the role of explanations, accounting for the system and user attributes in the process, and the range of different literature-derived explanation types. We indicate how the ontology can support user requirements for explanations in the domain of healthcare. We evaluate our ontology with a set of competency questions geared towards a system designer who might use our ontology to decide which explanation types to include, given a combination of users' needs and a system's capabilities, both in system design settings and in real-time operations. Through the use of this ontology, system designers will be able to make informed choices on which explanations AI systems can and should provide.