Fuzzy Clustering Algorithm to Catching Pattern of Change in District/City Poverty Variables Before and The Beginning of The Covid-19 Pandemic in Sulawesi Island

The first goal of the SDGs is to end poverty in any form. The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly affected several economic indicators, especially absolute poverty, especially in Sulawesi Island, which has increased poverty indicators, leading to the movement of values between districts/cities.  The grouping will show similar characteristics of absolute variable poverty. By the Fuzzy method clustering, each observation has a degree of membership so that from the degree of membership can be identified which areas have vulnerable to move from one cluster to another. Grouping using fuzzy algorithms will get an overview of districts of concern to the government during the pandemic so that the variable indicators of absolute poverty do not worsen due to the pandemic. Comparison with the absolute variables of poverty in 2019 and 2020 in the headcount index (P0), Poverty Gap Index (P1), and Poverty Severity Index (P2) in districts/cities on the island of Sulawesi based on silhouette coefficients shows that optimum clusters formed as many as 2 clusters, with a coefficient of 0.57 and 0.60 respectively. Cluster 1 has characteristics including areas with absolute poverty rates that tend to be more prosperous than cluster 2 in the 2019 and 2020 data groups on the island of Sulawesi. The fuzzy algorithm detects areas prone to displacement from cluster 1 to cluster 2, namely Bombana, Bone, Sangihe Islands, South Konawe, and Siau Tagulandang Biaro in 2019 and Bombana, Bone, Sangihe, and Maros Islands in 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 has not had much impact on the macro indicators of poverty seen in the transfer of membership from 2019 to 2020, which only occurred to 3 districts that changed, namely bolaang mongondouw and konawe selatan from cluster 1 to cluster 2 and Maros from cluster 2 to cluster 1.