Breaking Class Imbalance: Machine Learning Solutions for Stunting Detection

Abstract

Stunting is a critical public health issue primarily caused by malnutrition, which hampers the growth of children. This study evaluates the performance of two machine learning models, K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) and Decision Tree, in classifying stunting status in toddlers. Three strategies for handling class imbalance—no sampling, Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE), and random undersampling-are compared to enhance the detection of the minority class (stunting). The results show that KNN with SMOTE achieved the best performance, with an accuracy of 99.17% and an F1-Score of 99.17%, highlighting the model’s effectiveness in balancing sensitivity to the minority class. In contrast, although Decision Tree achieved an accuracy of 99.11% without sampling technique, it faced challenges in detecting stunting, which were addressed with the use of SMOTE, improving its accuracy to 97.41%. The application of random undersampling caused a significant decline in performance for both models. These findings underscore the effectiveness of SMOTE in handling class imbalance for stunting detection and provide valuable insights into the application of machine learning techniques in addressing public health issues.