Machine Learning for Mental Health: A Sentiment Analysis Approach for Detecting Depressive Tendencies on LinkedIn During Layoffs Using RoBERTa
Depression; Layoffs; LinkedIn; Machine Learning; RoBERTa; Sentiment Analysis; TF-IDF
In the present corporate set-up, layoffs are an unfortunate yet common occurrence. Such occurrences lead to loss of job security and can have direconsequences on an individual's mental health, leading to depression. Depression was a global health concern well before the current downsizing came into the picture. These trying times have acted as a catalyst for this illness that affects not just mental health but all aspects of an individuals life. The study investigates the use of sentiment analysis on LinkedIn data to identify and examine depressive tendencies among victims of layoffs. Web-scraped information was taken from LinkedIn profiles of individuals affected directly or indirectly by layoffs. RoBERTa, a transformers model, is used to classify people as depressed or not by evaluating sentiment and emotional cues. A comparison between four machine learning algorithms- Decision Tree, Logistic Regression, SVM, and Nae Bayes is drawn to check their ability to detect depression. The SVM classifier performed best with an accuracy of 95.59% and 83.52% with the CountVectorizer and TF-IDF feature selection methods, respectively. Sentiment analysis aids in this research by examining the melancholic undertones in the words and phrases used in texts authored by people affected by layoffs directly or indirectly. The knowledge gained from this research can significantly affect corporate initiatives, mental health services, and human resource practices during such challenging times. The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025.
Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies;Volume;413 SIST;pp.279-290
Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Restricted Access; Hardcopy may be available in the library
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-7717-4_19 https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/86000442424?origin=resultslist
Dabral A., Department of Statistics and Data Science, CHRIST (Deemed to Be University), Bengaluru, India; Sivakumar R., Department of Statistics and Data Science, CHRIST (Deemed to Be University), Bengaluru, India