Mental issues, internet addiction and quality of life predict burnout among Hungarian teachers: a machine learning analysis

Abstract Background Burnout is usually defined as a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion that affects people in various professions (e.g. physicians, nurses, teachers). The consequences of burnout involve decreased motivation, productivity, and overall diminished well-being. The machine learning-based prediction of burnout has therefore become the focus of recent research. In this study, the aim was to detect burnout using machine learning and to identify its most important predictors in a sample of Hungarian high-school teachers. Methods The final sample consisted of 1,576 high-school teachers (522 male), who completed a survey including various sociodemographic and health-related questions and psychological questionnaires. Specifically, depression, insomnia, internet habits (e.g. when and why one uses the internet) and problematic internet usage were among the most important predictors tested in this study. Supervised classification algorithms were trained to detect burnout assessed by two well-known burnout questionnaires. Feature selection was conducted using recursive feature elimination. Hyperparameters were tuned via grid search with 10-fold cross-validation. Due to class imbalance, class weights (i.e. cost-sensitive learning), downsampling and a hybrid method (SMOTE-ENN) were applied in separate analyses. The final model evaluation was carried out on a previously unseen holdout test sample. Results Burnout was detected in 19.7% of the teachers included in the final dataset. The best predictive performance on the holdout test sample was achieved by random forest with class weigths (AUC = 0.811; balanced accuracy = 0.745, sensitivity = 0.765; specificity = 0.726). The best predictors of burnout were Beck’s Depression Inventory scores, Athen’s Insomnia Scale scores, subscales of the Problematic Internet Use Questionnaire and self-reported current health status. Conclusions The performances of the algorithms were comparable with previous studies; however, it is important to note that we tested our models on previously unseen holdout samples suggesting higher levels of generalizability. Another remarkable finding is that besides depression and insomnia, other variables such as problematic internet use and time spent online also turned out to be important predictors of burnout.