Quantifying Academic Risk Factors for Student Depression Using WHO Frameworks: Odds Ratios, SHAP Explainability, and Tipping Point Analysis
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: Depression has become a serious concern for students worldwide. Aligned with the WHO Helping Adolescents Thrive (HAT) Guidelines and the Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) model, this study isolates five academically relevant factors- academic pressure, work/study hours, study satisfaction, sleep duration, and financial stress- from a dataset of 27,880 university students in India and quantifies their associations with depression. Unlike prior work that maximises classification accuracy, this study prioritises interpretability: logistic regression provides odds ratios (OR) with 95% confidence intervals, Random Forest (RF) and XGBoost rank predictors by feature importance, and SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) values extend the analysis to individual-level risk explanation. Sleep Duration is encoded as an ordinal integer (0-3) preserving its natural order, and Spearman correlations are computed on the original 27,880-row dataset prior to any resampling. SMOTE oversampling was applied exclusively to the training set, and performance was evaluated on the original imbalanced test set (n = 5,576). Both ensemble models achieve approximately 77-78% accuracy and an AUC of 0.845, confirmed by 5-fold pipeline cross-validation (CV AUC ∼ 0.843). Academic pressure is the dominant risk factor (OR = 2.271; RF importance = 0.481; mean |SHAP| = 0.174), while study satisfaction (OR = 0.796) and sleep duration (OR = 0.835) are protective. Interaction analysis reveals how depression risk is amplified by low sleep, high financial stress, and extended study hours: under average conditions, the 50% risk threshold is crossed at Academic Pressure ≈ 3.04, and under compounded adverse conditions, this tipping point shifts to even lower pressure values. These findings provide data-driven thresholds aligned with WHO-endorsed modifiable determinants to support early detection and institutional counselling.
Source: medRxiv
Authors: Tanvir Ahmed, Md. Rashid Al Asif
Institution: University of Barishal
Language: English
Topic: Student Stress and Coping
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7202156959