Optimizing UKT Prediction Based on Socio-Economic Features: A Multimodel Evaluation with Feature Selection Srategies

Abstract

Determining the tuition fee group (UKT) for new students in Indonesian public universities represents a complex challenge requiring an equitable, data-driven approach. This study introduces an integrative feature selection strategy that combines five popular techniques Chi-Square, Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE), LASSO Regression, Random Forest Importance, and Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) to extract the most relevant attributes from 53 socioeconomic variables of prospective students at Universitas Negeri Surabaya. As a novelty, the study identifies intersecting features consistently selected by all five methods and evaluates their impact on the performance of five classification algorithms: Support Vector Machine (SVM), Decision Tree, Random Forest, K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), and Naïve Bayes. Experimental results demonstrate a significant improvement in accuracy, with SVM increasing from 0.7550 to 0.7810. These findings confirm that integrative feature selection can optimize model performance while reducing data complexity. This study provides a replicable methodological contribution for developing transparent and adaptive classification systems based on socioeconomic data in higher education contexts.