Comparative Analysis of Ridge, LASSO, and Elastic Net Regularization Approaches in Handling Multicollinearity for Infant Mortality Data in South Sulawesi

Abstract

Infant mortality rate is a crucial indicator for assessing the health and infant care quality in a region. In the effort to reduce infant mortality rates, regression analysis serves as a tool to identify influential factors. However, regression analysis often encounters the challenge of multicollinearity, which involves high correlation among predictor variables. To address this issue, various regularization techniques can be applied, such as ridge regression, least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO), and elastic net. Ridge regression aims to control coefficient variance, while LASSO directs some coefficients to zero, functioning as variable selection. Elastic net combines the strengths of both methods by merging ridge and LASSO regularization. The objective of this research is to evaluate the performance of ridge regression, elastic net, and LASSO methods in handling multicollinearity issues, utilizing infant mortality rate data in South Sulawesi Province. The results indicate that the elastic net method outperforms both Ridge and LASSO methods. The best-performing model is obtained through elastic net with a coefficient of determination value of 60.81%, whereas ridge and LASSO methods yield coefficient of determination values of 54.11% and 58.18%, respectively. This demonstrates that the application of the elastic net method is capable of producing more accurate results in modeling the variables within the analysis of infant mortality rate data compared to other methods.