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BackgroundSubjective well-being (SWB), also known as happiness, plays an important role in evaluating both mental and physical health. Adolescents deserve specific attention because they are under a great variety of stresses and are at risk for mental disorders during adulthood.AimThe present paper aims to predict undergraduate students’ SWB by machine learning method.MethodsGradient Boosting Classifier which was an innovative yet validated machine learning approach was used to analyse data from 10 518 Chinese adolescents. The online survey included 298 factors such as depression and personality. Quality control procedure was used to minimise biases due to online survey reports. We applied feature selection to achieve the balance between optimal prediction and result interpretation.ResultsThe top 20 happiness risks and protective factors were finally brought into the predicting model. Approximately 90% individuals’ SWB can be predicted correctly, and the sensitivity and specificity were about 92% and 90%, respectively.ConclusionsThis result identifies at-risk individuals according to new characteristics and established the foundation for adolescent prevention strategies.

Happiness and depression are interlinked and both heritable, while personality, as an important predictor of them, shares the genetic basis with them. We conjecture that genetic factors of depression can affect both depressive symptoms (DS) and subjective well-being (SWB), while personality traits play important roles in mediating this process. In this study, 878 Han Chinese college freshmen and 384 Han Chinese patients with the major depressive disorder (MDD) were included. SNPs were genotyped using AGENA MassARRAY iPLEX technology and we investigated an important MDD variant rs454214. Correlation, association and mediation analysis were employed, aiming to decipher the complex relationship between SWB, DS, personality traits and the genetic variant. Association study indicated that rs454214 was not only associated with both SWB and DS (P < 0.05), but also possibly linked to MDD. Mediational analysis showed that rs454214 had no direct effect on SWB and DS, but had a significant indirect effect through personality traits, i.e., Extraversion, Neuroticism, Agreeableness and Openness to Experience or SWB, Extraversion, Neuroticism and Agreeableness for DS. This study found a shared genetic basis for happiness and depression; the causal process could be better explained if personality traits are taken as mediating factors. Subjective well-being(SWB) is a subjective measure of one's emotion and cognition, consisting of positive and negative affect as well as life satisfaction which stands for happiness 1. In contrast, depression can be a serious disorder with significantly increased risk of physical and mental disabilities 2,3. The depressive symptoms (DS) are warning signals for one's psychological health and if not taken seriously, the individual can easily develop into clinical depression 4. Happiness and depression are negatively correlated with each other 5 ; they both show heritability at a rate from 30% to 40%, according to many twin and family studies 6-8. Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that are significantly associated with them were discovered as well 9,10. On the other hand, according to previous studies, personality traits had been widely reported as important predictors of subjective well-being (SWB) 11,12 and depression 10,13,14 , which can usually be illustrated as a five-factor model (FFM), including Extraversion (E), Neuroticism (N), Conscientiousness (C), Agreeableness (A), and Openness to Experience (O) 15. Twin studies suggested it with a heritability of nearly 40% 16 and genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have probed several remarkable associating SNPs 17. In addition, correlation was found between personality and SWB as well as depression 10,12,17 in a genetic level. This complex intrinsic correlation suggested a shared genetic inheritance of happiness and depression and we conjecture that personality traits can play an important role as a mediator. The purpose of this study was to explore the possible shared genetic basis of SWB and DS through the MDD GWAS-supported SNP 9 and the med...