BACKGROUND Hypotension after the induction of anesthesia is known to be associated with various adverse events. The involvement of a series of factors makes the prediction of hypotension during anesthesia quite challenging. AIM To explore the ability and effectiveness of a random forest (RF) model in the prediction of post-induction hypotension (PIH) in patients undergoing cardiac surgery. METHODS Patient information was obtained from the electronic health records of the Second Affiliated Hospital of Hainan Medical University. The study included patients, ≥ 18 years of age, who underwent cardiac surgery from December 2007 to January 2018. An RF algorithm, which is a supervised machine learning technique, was employed to predict PIH. Model performance was assessed by the area under the curve (AUC) of the receiver operating characteristic. Mean decrease in the Gini index was used to rank various features based on their importance. RESULTS Of the 3030 patients included in the study, 1578 (52.1%) experienced hypotension after the induction of anesthesia. The RF model performed effectively, with an AUC of 0.843 (0.808-0.877) and identified mean blood pressure as the most important predictor of PIH after anesthesia. Age and body mass index also had a significant impact. CONCLUSION The generated RF model had high discrimination ability for the identification of individuals at high risk for a hypotensive event during cardiac surgery. The study results highlighted that machine learning tools confer unique advantages for the prediction of adverse post-anesthesia events.