Ishango fellows develop a machine learning model to predict mental health disease

Anise and Joseph, two Ishango 2021 fellows work on a mental health machine learning model to predict the impact of demographics mental health disease.

Host company: Omniscient Neurotechnology(o8t) is delivering practical and intuitive software solutions to connect pioneers in neurosurgery, neurology, and neuroscience with subject-specific brain analytics. Now, through enterprise-grade machine learning platforms, Omniscient is bringing connectomics (big data for the brain) to the front lines of both clinical therapy and scientific research.

The project: Fellows Joseph Marie Domguia and Anisie Uwimana worked alongside the data science team at Omniscient Neurotechnology(o8t) to better understand the impact of demographics on mental illness. The main focus was to understand the relationship between the demographic variables, the disease, and the connectomic data in order to better understand the implications of demographics for training predictive models and to avoid building a model that predicts a feature such as age rather than the mental health condition.

The outcome: Fellows Joseph and Anisie were able to build a model which successfully identified key features, such as age and sex which contribute to the predictions of their model. Watch Anise and Joseph explain their work below.

The project was not only technically successful, but it is also expanding Africa’s data science profile internationally.

“The work done by the Ishango.ai fellows throughout the program led to useful insights for our company. Having now seen it first-hand, there’s no doubt that Africa has excellent and untapped Data Science talent, capable of delivering real business value.”

– Hugh Taylor – Senior Data Scientist at Omniscient Neurotechnology (o8t)