The COVID-19 pandemic has caused effects in many sectors, including in businesses and enterprises. The most vulnerable businesses to COVID-19 are micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs). Therefore, this paper aims to analyze the business vulnerability of MSMEs in Indonesia using the fuzzy spatial clustering approach. The fuzzy spatial clustering approach had been implemented to analyze the social vulnerability to natural hazards in Indonesia. Moreover, this study proposes the Flower Pollination Algorithm (FPA) to optimize the Fuzzy Geographically Weighted Clustering (FGWC) in order to cluster the business vulnerability in Indonesia. We performed the data analysis with the dataset from Indonesia’s national socioeconomic and labor force survey (SUSENAS and SAKERNAS). We first compared the performance of FPA with traditional FGWC, as well as several known optimization algorithms in FGWC such as Artificial Bee Colony, Intelligent Firefly Algorithm, Particle Swarm Optimization, and Gravitational Search Algorithm. Our results showed that FPAFGWC has the best performance in optimizing the FGWC clustering result in the business vulnerability context. We found that almost all of the regions in Indonesia outside Java Island have vulnerable businesses. Meanwhile, in most of Java Island, particularly the JABODETABEK area that is the national economic backbone, businesses are not vulnerable. Based on the results of the study, we provide the recommendation to handle the gap between the number of micro and small enterprises (MSMEs) in Indonesia.
Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) is one of the most frequently used clustering method. However FCM has some disadvantages such as number of clusters to be prespecified and partition matrix to be randomly initiated which makes clustering result becomes inconsistent. Subtractive Clustering (SC) is an alternative method that can be used when number of clusters are unknown. Moreover, SC produces consistent clustering result. A hybrid method of FCM and SC called Subtractive Fuzzy CMeans (SFCM) is proposed to overcome FCM's disadvantages using SC. Both SFCM and FCM are implemented to cluster generated data and the result of the two methods are compared. The experiment shows that generally SFCM produces better clustering result than FCM based on six validity indices.
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