Earticle

This study explores the predictive factors of international students’ intention to participate in local festivals in Korea using CART and Random Forest analyses. Local festivals can provide international students with opportunities to experience local culture, interact with local communities, and adapt to Korean society. However, their participation may be constrained by information accessibility, language barriers, transportation, time, cost, and lack of companions. Using survey data collected from 509 international students in Korea, this study classified local festival participation intention into high and non-high participation intention groups based on the mean score of festival participation intention. The analysis included seven perceptual constructs—cultural interest, sense of local community belonging, expectation of social exchange, information accessibility, perceived enjoyment, perceived usefulness, and participation-facilitating conditions—together with demographic variables. The CART results showed that participation-facilitating conditions and perceived usefulness were the key variables distinguishing the high participation intention group. Random Forest analysis further confirmed the relative importance of perceived usefulness, participation-facilitating conditions, perceived enjoyment, and expectation of social exchange. The ROC-AUC values of both CART and Random Forest exceeded 0.70, indicating acceptable discriminative power. These findings suggest that international students’ intention to participate in local festivals is explained more strongly by practical usefulness and feasible participation conditions than by demographic characteristics alone. The study contributes to local festival research by extending the focus to international students and provides practical implications for local governments, festival organizers, and university international offices seeking to promote international students’ community participation.