Comparative Study of SVM, KNN, and Naïve Bayes for Sentiment Analysis of Religious Application Reviews

This study aims to evaluate and compare the performance of three machine learning algorithms—Support Vector Machine (SVM), K-Nearest Neighbors (K-NN), and Naïve Bayes—for sentiment classification of user reviews on the NU Online application in the Google Play Store. NU Online is a religious digital platform providing Islamic content such as articles, prayers, and worship schedules. A total of 1,500 user reviews were collected using web scraping, and 1,491 were retained after data cleaning. Preprocessing steps included punctuation removal, case folding, normalization, stopword removal, stemming, and tokenization. Sentiment labels (positive or negative) were automatically assigned using a lexicon-based approach. The performance of the models was assessed using accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score, calculated via confusion matrix with a training-testing data split. The results show that the SVM with a linear kernel achieved the best accuracy (81.6%), followed by Naïve Bayes (73.2%) and K-NN (66.9%). These findings indicate that SVM is the most effective algorithm in this context, providing practical contributions for developers of the NU Online digital religious platform and contributing to research in Indonesian natural language processing.