ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Public Mental Health
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1606947
This article is part of the Research TopicYouth Mental Health, Particularly in Asian PopulationsView all 82 articles
Identifying Risk Factors for Depression and Positive/Negative Mood Changes in College Students using Machine Learning
Provisionally accepted
- Liaoning Normal University, Dalian, China
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In this study, machine learning was used to assess the prediction of the magnitude of depression changes in college students based on various psychological variable information.A group of college students from a certain school completed two assessments in October 2021 and March 2022, respectively. We collected baseline levels of depression, demographic variables, parenting styles, college students' mental health information, personality information, coping styles, SCL-90, and social support information. We applied logistic regression, random forest, support vector machine, and k-nearest neighbor machine learning methods to predict the magnitude of depression changes in college students. We selected the best-performing model and outputted the importance of features collected at different time points.Results: Whether it is predicting the magnitude of positive changes or negative changes in depression, support vector machines (SVM) had the best prediction performance (with an accuracy of 89.4% for predicting negative changes in depression and an accuracy of 91.9% for predicting positive changes in depression).The baseline level of depression, father's emotional expression, and mother's emotional expression were all important predictors for predicting the negative and positive changes in depression among college students.Conclusions: Machine learning models can predict the extent of depression changes in college students. The baseline level of depression, as well as the emotional state of both fathers and mothers, play a significant role in predicting the negative and positive changes associated with depression in college students.This provides new insights and methods for future psychological health research and practice.
Keywords: machine learning, college students, prediction, Depression, change
Received: 06 Apr 2025; Accepted: 23 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Qiang, Hu, Chen, Guo, Yang, Wang, Liu, Zhang and Qi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Jinsheng Hu, Liaoning Normal University, Dalian, China
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