Journal of Computing Theories and Applications
Vol. 4 No. 2 (2026): JCTA 4(2) 2026

Explainable Machine Learning for Predicting Indonesian Vocational School Accreditation: Geographic Validation, Probability Calibration, and Subgroup Auditing

Muhamad Riyan Maulana (Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta)
Putu Sudira (Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta)
Priyanto Priyanto (Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta)
Yanuar Agung Fadlullah (Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta)
Dian Nurdiana (Universitas Terbuka)
Amir Hamzah bin Sofhi @ Subhi (Institut Pendidikan Guru Kampus Pendidikan Teknik)



Article Info

Publish Date
12 Sep 2026

Abstract

Vocational school accreditation is a high-stakes institutional classification, yet the geographic transferability and probability reliability of models based on routinely collected administrative data remain underexplored. This study developed a reproducible, leakage-controlled machine-learning framework for classifying the recorded accreditation classes C, B, and A among Indonesian vocational schools. Its main contribution is an integrated evaluation design that combines province-disjoint validation, probability calibration, cluster-aware uncertainty, and subgroup auditing to test reliability beyond conventional random-validation performance. A cross-sectional dataset containing 149,376 program-level records was deterministically aggregated into 14,391 schools, including 14,134 with valid labels. Eight provinces comprising 1,536 schools were locked before feature selection, model comparison, tuning, and calibration; 12,598 schools from 31 provinces supported development. The selected CatBoost model used 35 structural and vocational features with grouped out-of-fold temperature scaling. On the locked holdout, the calibrated model achieved balanced accuracy of 0.586, Macro F1 of 0.533, quadratic weighted kappa of 0.499, Macro ROC-AUC of 0.757, and expected calibration error of 0.049. School size, teacher resources, vocational staffing, program diversity, and status were most in-fluential. Class B had the lowest recall, and performance varied across school groups and provinces. The framework supports calibrated, auditable preliminary screening, but not automated accreditation or replacement of professional assessors.

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Journal Info

Abbrev

jcta

Publisher

Subject

Computer Science & IT Decision Sciences, Operations Research & Management

Description

Journal of Computing Theories and Applications (JCTA) is a refereed, international journal that covers all aspects of foundations, theories and the practical applications of computer science. FREE OF CHARGE for submission and publication. All accepted articles will be published online and accessed ...