Machine Learning Techniques for Stress Prediction in Working Employees

Stress disorders are a common issue among working IT professionals in the industry today. With changing lifestyle and work cultures, there is an increase in the risk of stress among the employees. Though many industries and corporates provide mental health related schemes and try to ease the workplace atmosphere, the issue is far from control. In this paper, we would like to apply machine learning techniques to analyze stress patterns in working adults and to narrow down the factors that strongly determine the stress levels. Towards this, data from the OSMI mental health survey 2017 responses of working professionals within the tech-industry was considered. Various Machine Learning techniques were applied to train our model after due data cleaning and preprocessing. The accuracy of the above models was obtained and studied comparatively. Boosting had the highest accuracy among the models implemented. By using Decision Trees, prominent features that influence stress were identified as gender, family history and availability of health benefits in the workplace. With these results, industries can now narrow down their approach to reduce stress and create a much comfortable workplace for their employees.

I. Introduction

Stress-related mental health disorders are not uncommon among the working class. Several studies in the past have raised concerns over the same. According to a study by the industry association, Assocham, more than forty-two percentage of working professionals in the Indian private sector suffer from depression or general anxiety disorder due to long work hours and tight deadlines. This portion of individuals is rising as stated in the 2018 Economic Times article based on the survey conducted by Optum[1] that half of the working professionals in India suffer from stress. The survey considered the responses of as many as 8 lakh employees from over 70 major companies, each with a workforce of 4,500 or above. Maintaining a stress-free workplace must be given a prime importance for greater productivity and well-being of the employees. Several steps can be taken to help working professionals cope up with stress for mental well-being like counselling assistance, career guidance, stress management sessions, and health awareness programs. Early identification of employees who will be needing such a help will improve the chances of such measures being successful.