Depressive disorder is one of the biggest attention focus on health industry. In summary it is a persistent feeling of sadness and loss of interest. Also called major depressive disorder or clinical depression, it affects how you feel, think and behave and can lead to a variety of emotional and physical problems.
But truthlly it is much more than that, it is a desease that affects around 500 million people around the world, and the second cause of death in people from 15 to 29 years old.
Possible causes include a combination of biological, psychological and social sources of distress. Increasingly, research suggests that these factors may cause changes in brain function, including altered activity of certain neural circuits in the brain.
This is the final project of Basic to Advanced statistics course.
The database was divided in two files. The first one consisted in a psychology evaluation os the person's mental health, the assesment was made through PHQ questionnaire. This file also includes gender, age, ethnicity, education and income.
The second file realtes to nutrition habits and exercise.
The main goal here is to identify if there is any relation between food consuption and depression disorder, I also included some tests regarding the relation with socioeconomic factors, since medical literature treats it as important to asses someone's mental health.
I started the project with a data cleaning, droping null values and merging the datasets.
After that, I evaluated the distributions of the variables using boxplot, dispersion charts and bar charts - depending if the variable was qualitative or quantitative.
For the hypothesis tests I used Welch ANOVA, Pearson correlation and T test.
After all, I applied a linear regression, as it was an important topic in the course. I evaluate all the requeriments to the regressions and tried some techniques to determine what was the most important variable in all the datasets.
I hope this analysis may help you in your studies, if you have any questions about it feel free to contact me through my linkedin profile.
Julia Hornick, data scientist.
