Jurnal Teknik Informatika (JUTIF)
Vol. 7 No. 4 (2026): JUTIF Volume 7, Number 4, August 2026

Comparative Analysis of Logistic Regression and Random Forest with SMOTE for Sentiment Classification on Ethanol Policy in Indonesia

Nabiel Muhammad Al Ghazali (Information System, Telkom University, Indonesia)
Hanif Fakhrurroja (School of Industrial Engineering, Telkom University, National Research and Innovation Agency, Indonesia)



Article Info

Publish Date
18 Aug 2026

Abstract

Public opinion plays a crucial role in the successful implementation of renewable energy policies, particularly regarding the transition to ethanol-based fuels in Indonesia. Understanding this sentiment is vital to mitigate social resistance and design effective communication strategies, as policy failure often stems from public rejection rather than technical issues. However, social media data regarding this topic is often highly imbalanced, with a dominance of non-positive sentiments (96%) compared to positive ones (4%), creating a severe bias in machine learning models known as the accuracy paradox. This study aims to classify public sentiment towards ethanol policy and evaluate the effectiveness of the Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE) in handling extreme class imbalance. The methods used include text preprocessing with Sastrawi, feature extraction using TF-IDF, and a comparative classification between Logistic Regression (LR) and Random Forest (RF). The novelty of this research lies in addressing the extreme imbalance in high-dimensional text data, proving that simpler linear models can outperform complex ensemble models in terms of minority class detection. The results show that the Optimized Logistic Regression model with SMOTE outperformed Random Forest, achieving a Precision of 1 and an F1-Score of 0.67 for the minority class, compared to RF which only reached an F1-Score of 0.55. This study concludes that for high-dimensional sparse text data, linear models combined with SMOTE provide superior performance in identifying minority sentiments.

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Journal Info

Abbrev

jurnal

Publisher

Subject

Computer Science & IT

Description

Jurnal Teknik Informatika (JUTIF) is an Indonesian national journal, publishes high-quality research papers in the broad field of Informatics, Information Systems and Computer Science, which encompasses software engineering, information system development, computer systems, computer network, ...