Journal of Soft Computing Exploration
Vol. 7 No. 3 (2026): September 2026

Rethinking the role of three-star ratings: Handling inconsistency in indonesian tourism reviews usingcost-sensitive learning XGBoost

Muhammad Nur Hikmah Ramadhan (Department of Informatics, Universitas Sebelas Maret, Indonesia)
Akhmad Syaifuddin (Department of Informatics, Universitas Sebelas Maret, Indonesia)
Ristu Saptono (Department of Informatics, Universitas Sebelas Maret, Indonesia)



Article Info

Publish Date
16 Aug 2026

Abstract

Indonesian people often give contrary online reviews, for instance ratings that do not always match the actual feelings. This can make it difficult for tourism sector, such as Solo Safari, to handle complaints and improve service quality. Consequently, this study has formulated a rating prediction model using the XGBoost algorithm with a dataset of 2,047 reviews that have been relabeled. The best model, the FastText-XGBoost with Cost-Sensitive Learning, signify that it performs quite well with an average difference the prediction is only 0.04 points from the actual rating. However, the results are not optimal because the meaning of the review text still feels fuzzy even though being relabeled. This problem arises because reviewers tend to position sentiment very positively or negatively in the moderate category, so the perimeters between classes become less clear. This study then proposed an extreme class restructuring by simplifying the category by removing the 3-star rating. This method can increase the accuracy of the model to 0.9440 and clarify the category limits. Therefore, the model can be used on the service dashboard to help Solo Safari management respond to critical feedback faster.

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Journal Info

Abbrev

journal

Publisher

Subject

Computer Science & IT Control & Systems Engineering Decision Sciences, Operations Research & Management Electrical & Electronics Engineering

Description

The journal focuses on publishing high-quality, original research and review articles in the field of Soft Computing, Informatics and Computer Science, emphasizing the development, application, and rigorous evaluation of Advanced Computational Methods, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning ...