Comparison of Chi-Square Automatic Interaction Detector (CHAID) and Random Forest Methods in the Classification of Household Poverty Status in Central Java

Abstract

Central Java was in second position as the province with the highest number of poor people in Indonesia in March 2020. Poverty alleviation efforts have been carried out, but many are still not yet on target. The purpose of this study was to model the classification of household poverty status in Central Java using CHAID and random forest methods and compare the two methods. The data used in this study is data from the 2020 National Socioeconomic Survey (SUSENAS) conducted by the Central Bureau of Statistics (BPS) for Central Java. The number of poor households is much less than non-poor households. Therefore, Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) was performed to handle unbalanced data. The random forest method produced better classification performance than the CHAID method with accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and AUC of 93,95%, 98,43%, 89,92%, and 0,9417, respectively. The important variables that build the random forest model are the floor area of the house, the age of the head of the household, cooking fuel, the place for the final disposal of feces, and ownership of the place to defecate.