<![CDATA[Depression among university students has become a serious mental health concern that can negatively affect academic performance and overall well-being. Early detection of Depression is essential to provide timely support and preventive interventions. This study proposes a machine learning approach to classify student Depression using a Support Vector Machine (SVM) combined with Backward Elimination (BE) for feature selection. The dataset used in this research was obtained from a public repository and consists of 502 student records with multiple psychological and demographic attributes. Data preprocessing included categorical encoding and Min–Max normalization, followed by an 80:20 split for training and testing. Experimental results show that the baseline SVM model achieved an accuracy of 0.9208, while the application of Backward Elimination improved the performance to 0.9604. In addition, precision, recall, and F1-score also showed notable improvements, indicating a reduction in misclassification, particularly for non-depressed students. These findings demonstrate that integrating feature selection with SVM can enhance classification performance and provide a more efficient model for supporting early Depression detection among university students.]]>
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