Random Forest, LSTM, and IndoBERT Comparison for TikTok App Sentiment Analysis

Imam Saputra (Sekolah Tinggi Ilmu Manajemen Sukma, Medan)
Mesran Mesran (Sekolah Tinggi Ilmu Manajemen Sukma, Medan)
Ruziana Mohamad Rasli (Universiti Utara Malaysia, Kedah)

Building of Informatics, Technology and Science
Vol 8 No 1 (2026): June 2026

The rapid growth of social media platforms like TikTok has generated a massive volume of user reviews on the Google Play Store, serving as a critical indicator of application service quality. However, the unstructured nature of Indonesian social media text and the significant imbalance between sentiment classes pose substantial challenges for automated classification systems. Addressing this class imbalance is highly crucial for application developers, as critical negative and neutral feedback containing essential feature complaints is easily marginalized by the overwhelming majority of positive reviews, leading to biased operational insights. This research conducted a comprehensive comparative study of three distinct computational paradigms: Random Forest, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and IndoBERT, to identify the most effective model for sentiment analysis. A dataset of 5,000 TikTok reviews was meticulously processed using a negation-aware preprocessing pipeline to preserve semantic integrity. To address class imbalance, architecture-specific techniques were deployed, including SMOTE for Random Forest, Class Weighting for LSTM, and Random OverSampling for IndoBERT. The experimental results demonstrate that IndoBERT significantly outperforms other models, achieving the highest global accuracy of 81% and a Macro F1-Score of 0.56. While Random Forest and LSTM yielded lower accuracies of 75% and 71%, respectively, they exhibited stability in predicting the majority class but struggled with the inherent ambiguity of neutral sentiments. The study concludes that IndoBERT’s bidirectional self-attention mechanism provides superior contextual understanding of Indonesian slang and non-formal syntax. This research contributes a robust framework for application developers to monitor public opinion objectively. Furthermore, the findings highlight that despite advanced balancing techniques, the "neutrality bottleneck" remains a challenge, suggesting that future research should explore aspect-based sentiment analysis to enhance classification granularity in the Indonesian NLP domain.