Human resources (HR) of various groups (e.g., ethnic minority or majority) and their quality play a crucial role in developing and promoting economic and social progress in every region. However, current methods of quality assessment, e.g., surveys, have not provided data-driven insight for policymakers to design targeted interventions. Machine learning is one of the emerging technologies that could analyze complex datasets to support data insight for policymakers in sustainable economic development. This study proposes a framework to predict the quality of HR from ethnic minority community by using various machine learning techniques (K-nearest neighbors, multilayer perceptron, gradient boosting, and voting classifier). To achieve the best model, two techniques for feature selection (recursive feature elimination and extra trees) are employed. In the experiments, the ethnic minority HR data has been used to conduct. Experimental results show that the gradient boosting consistently outperformed other models across feature selection techniques (≥0.99). The findings from this study enhance prediction methods for HR and provide valuable insights for policymakers to develop effective policies for ethnic minority communities.

Mental stress is a growing global health concern, closely linked to psychological, behavioral, and physiological disorders. Accurate and early prediction of mental stress is crucial for timely interventions and improved health outcomes. Despite numerous studies leveraging machine learning (ML) techniques for stress classification, many have overlooked the integration of systematic feature selection and comprehensive model evaluation, limiting generalizability and interpretability. To address these gaps, this study proposes a robust ML-based framework that combines optimized feature selection methods - Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE), Extra Trees (ET), and Boruta - with various classification algorithms including Random Forest (RF), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Decision Tree (DT), Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Gradient Boosting, and voting classifier. The models were evaluated using 10-fold cross-validation and ranked using the TOPSIS multi-criteria decision-making approach. The experimental results demonstrate high predictive performance across models (accuracy ≥ 0.98), with RF, DT, MLP, and Gradient Boosting achieving perfect accuracy (1.00). Among all configurations, the RF-Boruta model emerged as the most optimal (TOPSIS score: 0.914558). These findings highlight the effectiveness of combining systematic feature optimization with ML classification for accurate and interpretable stress prediction, offering valuable insights for data-driven mental health interventions.

Sentiment analysis of students’ feedback using machine learning algorithms has emerged as a valuable tool for understanding students’ sentiments and improving educational outcomes. Currently, existing systems use frequency-based methods for feature selection (e.g., Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) and Bag of Words (BoW)) not to capture the subtleties of emotions expressed in student feedback and do not provide insights into the specific concerns of students via topics or themes. In this study, we propose the Student Sentiment from Feedback (SSF) framework, which includes four main procedures: pre-processing, feature selection, classification, and theme finding. The SSF framework classifies student sentiments and subsequently groups feedback into themes using semantic networks based on word co-occurrence. Our innovative feature selection approach combines TF-IDF with sentiment-based features derived from SentiWordNet and intensifiers, creating a robust feature vector that enhances the dataset’s richness and improves classification accuracy and robustness. In the experiments, we utilize a public dataset from Kaggle, applying our proposed method and various machine learning models (e.g., k-nearest neighbor, decision tree, random forest, multilayer perceptron, support vector machine, gradient boosting, and extreme gradient boosting). The experimental results show that our concatenated features achieve the highest accuracy across all machine learning models (greater than 0.82). Our study demonstrates the efficacy of this hybrid feature selection method, contributing to better understanding and decision-making in educational settings.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to different health outcomes, including long COVID (LCo) and mental health (MH) disorders, impacting millions globally. To enable early healthcare diagnosis, including the prediction of MH conditions and LCo, various research studies have utilized machine learning (ML) techniques. However, there is still a gap in understanding the mental health of recovered COVID-19 patients with long COVID using ML techniques. This study aims to bridge this gap by developing and evaluating ML models, including support vector machine, multilayer perceptron (MLP), k-nearest neighbor, gradient boosting, voting classifier, and extreme gradient boosting, tailored for mental health and long COVID datasets from recovered COVID-19 patients. Additionally, feature selection methods, e.g., Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE) and Extra Trees (ET), and optimized models with hyper-parameter tuning will be employed. Our experiments utilize the dataset of recovered COVID-19 patients. Among these ML models, the MLP with ET-based features achieved the highest accuracy and AUC scores in this dataset, with 1.00 and 0.97 ± 0.02, respectively. The research reveals the high prevalence and risk factors of mental health disorders and long COVID from the dataset. These findings will contribute to personalized healthcare strategies for individuals navigating the complexities of post-COVID-19 recovery, integrating machine learning insights into mental health and long COVID support.