Analyzing and identifying predictable time range for stress prediction based on chaos theory and deep learning

Stress is a common problem globally. Prediction of stress in advance could help people take effective measures to manage stress before bad consequences occur. Considering the chaotic features of human psychological states, in this study, we integrate deep learning and chaos theory to address the stress prediction problem.

Based on chaos theory, we embed one’s seemingly disordered stress sequence into a high dimensional phase space so as to reveal the underlying dynamics and patterns of the stress system, and meanwhile are able to identify the stress predictable time range. We then conduct deep learning with a two-layer (dimension and temporal) attention mechanism to simulate the nonlinear state of the embedded stress sequence for stress prediction.

We validate the effectiveness of the proposed method on the public available Tesserae dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the pure deep learning method and Chaos method in both 2-label and 3-label stress prediction.

Integrating deep learning and chaos theory for stress prediction is effective, and can improve the prediction accuracy over 2% and 8% more than those of the deep learning and the Chaos method respectively. Implications and further possible improvements are also discussed at the end of the paper.