Balanced clustering for student admission school zoning by parameter tuning of constrained k-means

Abstract

The Indonesian government issued a regulation through the Ministry of Education and Culture, number 51 of 2018, which contains zoning rules to improve the quality of education in school educational institutions. This research aims to compare the performance of the k-means algorithm with the constrained k-means algorithm to model the zoning of each school area based on the shortest distance parameter between the school location and the domicile of prospective students. The study used data from 2,248 prospective students and 22 public school locations. The results of testing the k-means algorithm in grouping showed the formation of non-circular patterns in the cluster membership with different numbers of centroid cluster members. In contrast, testing the constrained k-means algorithm showed balanced outcomes in cluster membership with a membership value of 103 for each school as the cluster center. The research findings state that the developed constrained k-means algorithm solves the problem of unbalanced data clustering and overlapping issues in the process of new student admissions. In other words, the constrained k-means algorithm can be a reference for the government in making decisions on new student admissions.