Explainable prediction of problematic smartphone use among South Korea's children and adolescents using a Machine learning approach

Background: Korea is known for its technological prowess, has the highest smartphone ownership rate in the world at 95%, and the smallest gap in smartphone ownership between generations. Since the onset of the COVID19 pandemic, problematic smartphone use is becoming more prevalent among Korean children and adolescent owing to limited school attendance and outdoor activities, resulting in increased reliance on smartphones. 40.1% of adolescents are classified as high-risk, with only the adolescent group showing a persistent rise year after year. Objective: The study purpose is to present data-driven analysis results for predicting and preventing smartphone addiction in Korea, where problematic smartphone use is severe. Participants and Methods: To predict the risk of problematic smartphone use in Korean children and adolescents at an early stage, we used data collected from the Smartphone Overdependence Survey conducted by the National Information Society Agency between 2017 and 2021. Eight representative machine and deep learning algorithms were used to predict groups at high risk for smartphone addiction: Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting Machine (GBM), extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), Light GBM, Categorical Boosting, Multilayer Perceptron, and Convolutional Neural Network. Results: The XGBoost ensemble algorithm predicted 87.60% of participants at risk of future problematic smartphone usebased on precision. Our results showed that prolonged use of games, webtoons/web novels, and ebooks, which have not been found in previous studies, further increased the risk of problematic smartphone use. Conclusions: Artificial intelligence algorithms have potential predictive and explanatory capabilities for identifying early signs of problematic smartphone use in adolescents and young children. We recommend that a variety of healthy, beneficial, and face-to-face activities be offered as alternatives to smartphones for leisure and play culture.