<![CDATA[Student mental health is an important issue that requires a data-driven approach to support the classification process of student depression. This study aims to analyze the factors that cause depression and optimize the performance of the classification model by applying the Random Forest algorithm. The data used in this research is secondary data from the Student Depression Dataset obtained from the Kaggle platform, with a total of 27,901 data points. The research stages begin with data collection followed by Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA), which includes descriptive statistical analysis and correlation between variables using a heatmap. Data preprocessing involves removing irrelevant features, handling missing values, encoding categorical data, and splitting the data into training and testing sets. Model development is carried out through three scenarios: a baseline model, hyperparameter optimization using GridSearchCV, and RandomizedSearchCV. Model performance evaluation is measured using a Confusion Matrix to analyze accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. The results show that all models produce relatively stable accuracy in the range of 0.84–0.85. The model with GridSearchCV optimization provides the best performance with a recall value of 0.8869 and an F1-score of 0.8719. This increase in recall is important to minimize the risk of false negatives in identifying students experiencing depression. It is hoped that these findings can contribute as a decision support system for educational institutions in more accurately detecting and managing students' mental health.]]>
