No Transformer Beats Six Covariates: Long-Horizon Prediction of Depressive Symptoms from Childhood Essays

Excerpt

arXiv:2610.07764v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Natural language processing (NLP) models can detect depression-related language in text written near the time symptoms are measured, but whether pretrained transformers can predict depressive symptoms from text written twelve years earlier is largely untested. In the National Child Development Study, a British birth cohort, we predict probable depressive symptoms at age 23 from essays the same people wrote at age 11. Our baseline, a logistic regres