An Analysis of Meteorological Data in Sumatra and Nearby using Agglomerative Clustering

Abstract

Sumatra is one of the biggest and the second most crowded islands in Indonesia. Sumatra is also a place of abundance of tropical flora and fauna. This paper aims to cluster the cities in Sumatra and nearby based on the meteorology data. It implements Agglomerative hierarchical clustering and uses a daily time series dataset from 17 cities from 1 January 2010 to 31 December 2023. The dataset contains variables minimum temperature, maximum temperature, average temperature, humidity, sunshine duration, and average wind speed. The preprocessing data was dedicated to managing the missing values and data aggregation to create single-form data. The single-form data contains cities and meteorological variables used as an input for the clustering algorithm, i.e. K-Means, Fuzzy C-Means, K-Medoid, intelligent K-KMeans, and Agglomerative clustering. The Agglomerative clustering outperforms other methods (i.e. K-Means, Fuzzy C-Means, K-Medoid, and intelligent K-KMeans) and produces Silhouette scores of 0.11. The clusters are then analyzed to find their unique pattern. The cut-off when the number cluster is two, Agglomerative hierarchical clustering gathers Aceh, Sabang, Pekanbaru, Padang, and Padang Lawas in Cluster 1. Other cities, i.e., Nagan Raya, Batam, Jambi, Bandar Lampung, Medan, Pangkalpinang, Palembang, Bengkulu, Belitung, Tapanuli, Deli Serdang, and Nias are in Cluster 2. The results can be briefly explained that the characteristic of Cluster 1 has a higher average temperature, lower humidity, and lower sunshine duration than cities in Cluster 2. However, Cluster 1 has a lower average minimum temperature than Cluster 2. The pairs of cities which have the most similarities are (Aceh, Sabang), (Pekanbaru, Padang Lawas), (Nagan Raya, Nias), (Jambi, Palembang), (Bengkulu, Tapanuli), and (Medan, Deli Serdang). The annual trend in several cities shows that there exists an increasing trend in minimum temperature, rising sunshine duration, and decreasing wind speed. These are signs of climate change that need a proper handling.