An explainable hybrid of classical and quantum support vector machine models for maternal mental health risk prediction using multicountry data

Abstract Maternal mental health disorders remain a major public health problem, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, where limited mental health resources and inadequate screening systems lead to late diagnosis and intervention. Recent advances in artificial intelligence have demonstrated great potential in improving the prediction of early maternal mental health risks. However, most current methods are limited to traditional machine learning models and lack interpretability. This study introduces the explainable Hybrid Classical-Quantum Support Vector Machine (SVM) framework for the prediction of maternal mental health risk using multicountry psychosocial and clinical data from Uganda and Pakistan. The proposed framework integrates classical SVM learning with quantum-enhanced feature representations, while SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) are leveraged to increase the model transparency and clinical interpretability. A comparative evaluation was performed against Random Forest, XGBoost, LightGBM, CatBoost, Stacking Ensemble, Classical SVM, and standalone Quantum SVM using Accuracy, Precision, Recall, F1-score, Receiver Operating Characteristic Area Under the Curve (ROC-AUC) and Precision-Recall Area Under the Curve (PR-AUC). We performed two experimental settings: one using the full set of features and another using a set of features without leakage, i.e. excluding variables that directly contribute to the EPDS-derived outcome. Under the complete feature set, the proposed Hybrid Classical-Quantum SVM achieved 99.86% accuracy, 99.80% F1-score, 99.92% ROC-AUC and 99.91% PR-AUC, while maintaining competitive performance after the leakage-free evaluation. The SHAP analysis provided enhanced model interpretability, identifying clinically meaningful demographic, obstetric, socioeconomic and psychosocial factors associated with maternal mental health risk. Our results demonstrate that hybrid classical-quantum learning offers a competitive and explainable paradigm for predicting maternal mental health risk and highlights the complementary nature of quantum feature representations in healthcare analytics.