Abstract: Objective: To construct and validate the risk prediction model of social maladjustment in preschool children with malignancies. Methods: From July to December 2021, 475 preschool children with malignancies and their primary caregivers were recruited. They were randomly assigned to training set (n=332) and test set (n=143) in a ratio of 7?:?3. The training set was screened for socially maladjusted children by the Social Adjustment Rating Scale, and Logistic regression and XGBoost methods were used to identify predictors and construct the model. The Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve, accuracy, F1-Score, and Kappa were used to evaluate the consistency and prediction accuracy of the model. Results: The incidence of the risk of social maladjustment in preschool children with malignancies was 44.0%. The XGBoost prediction model outputs the importance of maladjustment risk factors as general family functioning, age, the average length of internet use, region, infant attachment, stage of illness, family coping style, and whether it relapsed. The area under ROC curve of the model was 0.839, the accuracy was 83.9%, the Kappa was 0.826, and the F1-Score was 0.857. Conclusion: The prediction model based on XGBoost has good prediction accuracy and consistency, which can be used to screen individual adaptation maladjustment risk.

Key words: preschool; children; malignancies; social adjustment; prediction model