Machine Learning for Mapping and Forecasting Poverty in North Sumatera: A Data-Driven Approach

Discussing poverty is crucial because it affects many facets of society, including socioeconomic disparity, crime, and the inability to obtain high-quality education. One of the provinces with the highest poverty rate in Indonesia is North Sumatra. A strategy is required to gather accurate data to effectively reduce poverty. Poverty mapping and prediction were conducted in North Sumatra to get a precise spatial distribution of poverty, the operation of the poverty model, and forecasting using machine learning (ML). Poverty prediction was conducted using a random forest (RF) algorithm and poverty mapping was conducted using the K-Means algorithm. The poverty mapping showed a significant inertia value decline in the third and fourth clusters of the elbow graph. The third cluster (0.313) was superior to the fourth cluster (0.244) in the silhouette index. Thus, there were three poverty clusters - low, medium, and high - that were used in the model. The best model was created using the grid search cross-validation, while the best prediction results were created using the RF algorithm, with the following parameters: n-estimator = 50, max depth = 10, min samples split = 2, and min samples leaf = 1. The mean squared error (MSE) of the RF model's predictions was 0.002617, or satisfactory precision.