Clustering for Mapping Food Insecurity in the Land of Papua: A Five-Year Multiyear Analysis with Spatial Interpretation (2020-2024)

Food insecurity in the Land of Papua remains a critical issue due to extreme geographical conditions, limited infrastructure, and unstable food distribution systems. This study aims to map food vulnerability across 42 districts/cities in Papua using insufficient food consumption data from 2020 to 2024. Clustering was performed using five methods—Single Linkage, Complete Linkage, Ward, K-Means, and Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM)—and evaluated using three validation indices: Silhouette, Davies–Bouldin Index (DBI), and Calinski–Harabasz Index (CHI). To obtain a balanced and comprehensive model selection, a Performance-Based Weighting (PBW) framework was applied. In this framework, the DBI was first transformed to ensure a consistent higher-is-better orientation, and all validation indices were normalized to the [0,1] range prior to computing variance-based weights. This normalization step mitigates potential scale dominance, particularly from the unbounded CHI metric, ensuring proportional contribution from each validation criterion in the aggregated score. Although individual validation indices exhibited varying optimal values of k, the integrated PBW evaluation consistently identifies the two-cluster configuration as the most stable and interpretable overall structure. Specifically, Complete Linkage with k = 2 achieved the highest combined PBW score (0.8658), reflecting strong cluster separation and consistency across validation measures. Spatial interpretation of the resulting clusters reveals that the first cluster predominantly consists of high-risk mountainous districts with persistently elevated levels of food consumption inadequacy, particularly during 2021–2022, while the second cluster represents coastal and urban regions with comparatively lower and improving prevalence in 2023–2024. These findings provide a multiyear clustering perspective with geographic insight into regional disparities in food insecurity across Papua. Overall, this study presents a data-driven and reproducible multiyear clustering framework that integrates multiple validation criteria to enhance robustness in model selection and support evidence-based regional policy formulation.