JOURNAL OF APPLIED INFORMATICS AND COMPUTING
Vol. 10 No. 3 (2026): June 2026

Comparing Decision Tree and Optimized LightGBM for Attrition Prediction

Dhea Maharani (Sistem Informasi, Fakultas Ilmu Komputer, Universitas Dian Nuswantoro)
Farrikh Alzami (Universitas Dian Nuswantoro)
MY. Teguh Sulistyono (Sistem Informasi, Fakultas Ilmu Komputer, Universitas Dian Nuswantoro)
Aris Nurhindarto (Sistem Informasi, Fakultas Ilmu Komputer, Universitas Dian Nuswantoro)
Dewi Agustini Santoso (Faculty of Computer Science, Universitas Dian Nuswantoro)
Muslih Muslih (Faculty of Computer Science, Universitas Dian Nuswantoro)
Henry Bastian (Faculty of Computer Science, Universitas Dian Nuswantoro)



Article Info

Publish Date
08 Jun 2026

Abstract

Employee turnover poses a considerable challenge for organizations, impacting productivity and raising recruitment expenses. This research seeks to evaluate the effectiveness of Decision Tree and Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM) models in forecasting employee attrition. The study utilizes a quantitative experimental design, leveraging a secondary dataset sourced from Mendeley. Before model development, data preprocessing was performed, and model evaluation was carried out using metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and ROC-AUC. Each algorithm was assessed under three different configurations baseline, regularization, and hyperparameter tuning through GridSearchCV. The experimental findings indicate that the Decision Tree model is prone to overfitting and has limited capabilities in detecting attrition classes, even though optimization raises the ROC-AUC score to 0.80. In comparison, LightGBM demonstrates more reliable and consistent performance. The Tuned LightGBM model achieved the highest performance on the test dataset, with an Accuracy of 0.81, a Precision of 0.82, a Recall of 0.71, F1-Score of 0.76, and an ROC-AUC of 0.85. An analysis of feature importance reveals that job satisfaction, work-life balance, emotional commitment, work experience, and allowances are the key factors influencing attrition prediction. These results indicate that LightGBM not only performs exceptionally well, but it is also able to offer insights into the critical factors that are important for data-driven retention strategies.

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Journal Info

Abbrev

JAIC

Publisher

Subject

Computer Science & IT

Description

Journal of Applied Informatics and Computing (JAIC) Volume 2, Nomor 1, Juli 2018. Berisi tulisan yang diangkat dari hasil penelitian di bidang Teknologi Informatika dan Komputer Terapan dengan e-ISSN: 2548-9828. Terdapat 3 artikel yang telah ditelaah secara substansial oleh tim editorial dan ...