Quantifying Academic Risk Factors for Student Depression Using WHO Frameworks: Odds Ratios, SHAP Explainability, and Tipping Point Analysis

Academic pressure is the dominant academic risk factor for depression in a dataset of 27,880 university students in India, with OR = 2.271 and SHAP mean |SHAP| = 0.174.

• Why it matters: Depression among students is a global concern, and the study targets a gap in interpretable, WHO-aligned identification of modifiable academic determinants.
• What they did: Using logistic regression for odds ratios (95% CIs), Random Forest and XGBoost for feature ranking, and SHAP for individual-level explanations, models were trained with SMOTE only on the training set and tested on n = 5,576.
• The result: Depression risk is linked to low sleep, high financial stress, and extended study hours, with a 50% tipping threshold at academic pressure ≈ 3.04 that shifts lower under compounded adverse conditions.

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