Lost at starting line: Predicting maladaptation of university freshmen based on educational big data

The transition from secondary education to higher education could be challenging for most freshmen. For students who fail to adjust to university life smoothly, their status may worsen if the university cannot offer timely and proper guidance. Helping students adapt to university life is a long‐term goal for any academic institution. Therefore, understanding the nature of the maladaptation phenomenon and the early prediction of “at‐risk” students are crucial tasks that urgently need to be tackled effectively. This article aims to analyze the relevant factors that affect the maladaptation phenomenon and predict this phenomenon in advance. We develop a prediction framework (MAladaptive STudEnt pRediction, MASTER) for the early prediction of students with maladaptation. First, our framework uses the SMOTE (Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique) algorithm to solve the data label imbalance issue. Moreover, a novel ensemble algorithm, priority forest, is proposed for outputting ranks instead of binary results, which enables us to perform proactive interventions in a prioritized manner where limited education resources are available. Experimental results on real‐world education datasets demonstrate that the MASTER framework outperforms other state‐of‐art methods.