<![CDATA[Gaming addiction classification is challenging because problematic gaming behavior is influenced by multiple behavioral, psychological, lifestyle, and contextual factors, while redundant or weakly informative features may reduce the effectiveness of machine learning models. To address this issue, this study investigates minimum Redundancy Maximum Relevance (mRMR) feature selection to obtain a more compact and discriminative feature representation for gaming addiction classification. Random Forest, Support Vector Machine (SVM), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), and K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) were evaluated using two configurations: a baseline using the complete predictor set and an mRMR-based configuration using the 15 highest-ranked features. All preprocessing, feature selection, hyperparameter tuning, and cross-validation were performed on the training data, while the independent test set was used only for final evaluation. The results show that the effect of mRMR varies across classifiers, indicating that feature reduction does not universally improve classification performance. The strongest improvement was obtained by SVM, whose accuracy increased from 0.940 to 0.960 and F1-score from 0.824 to 0.857 after applying mRMR. The mRMR–SVM model also achieved a precision of 1.000 and a recall of 0.750. In contrast, the baseline XGBoost model achieved a higher recall of 0.914, indicating a trade-off between false-positive reduction and positive-case detection. These findings demonstrate that mRMR can improve classification when the selected feature space is well aligned with the learning mechanism of the classifier, particularly for margin-based SVM. The selected features further indicate that gaming addiction classification is associated not only with gaming intensity but also with psychosocial and lifestyle characteristics. Therefore, the proposed mRMR–SVM configuration provides a compact and effective representation for gaming addiction classification, although validation on larger and more diverse datasets is required before broader generalization.]]>
