With the intensive commissioning of high voltage direct current, transient voltage problems have become increasingly prominent, which seriously threatens the safe and stable operation of the power system. On the basis of cascaded CatBoost (CasCatBoost) and sparrow search algorithm (SSA), a novel temporal‐adaptive data‐driven method for short‐term voltage stability (STVS) assessment is proposed in this paper. First, normalized mutual information feature selection is employed for important feature selection to reduce the computational burden. Taking the important features as inputs, the CasCatBoost model is constructed to mine STVS informatization. On the basis of CatBoost and cascaded structure, CasCatBoost can enhance the assessment accuracy without sacrificing the assessment earliness. Furthermore, the SSA is embedded into the offline phases of CasCatBoost to determine the optimal confidence threshold. Extensive numerical tests are conducted on the improved New England 39‐bus system, and the simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other representative machine learning algorithms and exhibits excellent reliability, rapidity, and applicability.