Beyond Linear Statistics: A Machine Learning Ecosystem for Early Screening of School Bullying

This study developed and validated a Machine Learning (ML) ecosystem for the early screening of school victimization among Ecuadorian adolescents, a phenomenon that poses a critical barrier to educational equity. Addressing previous methodological limitations, this research intentionally eliminated circular reasoning by excluding all internal psychometric items from the feature set, focusing strictly on sixteen socio-environmental and demographic predictors. A quantitative study was conducted with 1413 students in the province of Tungurahua, utilizing the Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE) to correct class imbalance. Supervised classification algorithms, including SVM, Random Forest, and XGBoost, were compared. The results demonstrated that the Random Forest model achieved the most balanced performance, reaching an Accuracy of 60.3% and a Macro F1-score of 0.382. Feature importance analysis identified household structure (Living_With_Monoparental) and Family_Coping_Capacity as the most significant predictors of high-risk profiles. These findings provided a statistically honest and ecologically valid tool for Student Counseling Departments (DECE), enabling a transition toward proactive risk identification grounded in observable social vulnerability rather than reactive symptom reporting.