Visualizing COVID-19 Vaccination Rate and

Vaccination Centre in Malaysia using DBSCAN

Clustering model
Sofiyah Insyirah Mohd Said Raihah Aminuddin Nor Afirdaus Zainal Abidin
Faculty of Computer and Mathematical College of Computing, Informatics College of Computing, Informatics
Sciences and Media and Media
2022 IEEE International Power and Renewable Energy Conference (IPRECON) | 978-1-6654-9175-4/22/$31.00 ©2022 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/IPRECON55716.2022.10059495

MARA University of Technology MARA University of Technology MARA University of Technology

Malacca Branch (Jasin Campus) Malacca Branch (Jasin Campus) Malacca Branch (Jasin Campus)
Malacca, Malaysia Malacca, Malaysia Malacca, Malaysia
raihah1@uitm.edu.my *afirdaus@uitm.edu.my

Siti Diana Nabilah Mohd Nasir Asma Zubaida Mohamed Ibrahim

Kingston University City University
London, United Kingdom Selangor, Malaysia
s.mohdnasir@kingston.ac.uk asma.zubaida@city.edu.my

Abstract—In February 2021, the Malaysian government
launched a vaccination campaign against coronavirus disease
2019 (COVID-19). However, there is a problem in identifying
suitable location for vaccination centre should be allocated. At the
same time, there are population that living in the rural area and
has difficulty to travel to the nearest vaccination centres. There-
fore, based on the data of vaccination rate collected by Ministry
of Health, the proposed project aims to classify and visualise the
data based on number of COVID-19 vaccination rate and centre
in Malaysia for the adult and adolescent populations. This project
uses machine learning technique called Density-Based Spatial
Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN). The system
is developed in Python language platform for back-end devel-
opment, and PyCharm is utilised for front-end development in
web-based platform. This project follows four phases in Waterfall
model: requirement analysis, design, implementation, and testing.
The system is evaluated for functionality and usability based on
user satisfaction and the accuracy of the model. The results of the
testing shows that all the functionality of the system have been
implemented successfully in the system. The system also rated
good according to SUS Questionnaire in usability testing with
score of 88.5%. The model of machine learning also achieved
a good accuracy score which is greater than 0.3. In conclusion,
the data visualization web-based application helps the Malaysian
government to identify location for additional vaccination centres
in strategic locations and it helps Malaysian people to locate
nearby vaccination centres in their area.
Index Terms—COVID-19, vaccination centre, clustering, DB-
SCAN, data visualization, web-based
I. I NTRODUCTION
In Malaysia, on February 24, 2021 the Prime Minister
of Malaysia, Muhyiddin Yassin, was the first recipient in
Malaysia to receive a COVID-19 vaccination injection [1].
Since then the Malaysian government has been promoting and
distributing COVID-19 vaccines to Malaysians people. The
vaccine may reduce the risk of transmission of COVID-19
and will help to protect individuals from becoming sick [2].
The vaccine act as booster to the immune system and act as
safeguard against later infection or disease. However, in order
to get vaccinated, people must book an appointment and go to
the nearest vaccination centre. The government also provide
another option for those who are living in rural are to book
an appointment at a mobile vaccination centre [3]. The mobile
vaccination centre. is also for individual who are disabled and
cannot travel far away to get vaccinated [4]. The advantage of
the mobile vaccination centre that the location of the centre
can be relocate based on demand of the people.
A. Problem statements
There are two problems that have been identified in sup-
porting the effort of Malaysia government to provide vaccines
to Malaysians people. Firstly, there are limited number of
vaccination centre and some people has lack of information
about the location of the centre.
Secondly, it will cost a lot of money on travel for indi-
viduals that need to travel long distance to the centre. Most
people will cancel the appointment because the location of
the vaccination immunisation centre is too far away and they
have transpiration issues such as no public transport and no
personal vehicle. Another serious issue is distinct time interval
between the first and second doses. As it is difficult to access
the nearest centre, the individual of first dose might have a
longer waiting time to get the second dose. Therefore, this
will interfere the effect of vaccine on their body. This is due
to the fact that each vaccination has a specific window of time
between the first and second doses that must be followed in
order to produce the best outcomes.

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B. Aims
The project aims to create dashboard of data visualisation
of vaccination rates to monitor areas where people in Malaysia
are not getting at least two doses of COVID-19 vaccine using
web-based application. The main significant of this project is
the system may help Malaysian government to decide where
to build and locate mobile vaccination centres based on local
demands. It can also help Malaysian people to find the nearest
vaccination centre to their residence.
There are two objectives in this project:
1) To design and develop a web-based application of a
mapping data visualization model of vaccination rate
using machine learning model
2) To test the functionality and usability of the system and
the accuracy of the machine learning model.
The paper is organized as follows:
• Literature review and methodology are presented in Sec-
tion 2 and Section 3, respectively.
• Limitation of the project and future work are presented
in Section 4.
• Conclusion is conveyed in Section 5.
II. L ITERATURE R EVIEW
Data mining is a modern technique used to detect or identify
an intriguing pattern in data [5].
A. Clustering Technique
In data mining there is a technique called clustering, the
data may be grouped or the pattern of the dataset may be
ascertained. The clustering technique will reveal the structure
of an unlabelled set of data. A cluster is a group of similar
things or pieces of data that are actually unlike one another in
the set of data. The clustering technique can be used to find
outliers or abnormalities in a dataset. The advantages of this
technique is that the data scientist can learn about the dataset
and utilise it as a starting point for learning a new dataset. For
this project, a clustering model DBSCAN was chosen as the
clustering model.
1) DBSCAN: The density-based clustering method known
as DBSCAN is widely used for determine the distance between
each point of data cluster [6]. There are two terms that is es-
sential in this model: epsilon and minimum points (minP ts).
The epsilon is the radius of the core point. The epsilon is
often stated in terms of feature space and Euclidean distance.
The term minP ts refers to the smallest set of points in the
epsilon’s immediate vicinity in the sphere-shaped cluster. The
model will pick a point and determine the core as a core point
or not. Then the core point must have been greater than the
number of minP ts and epsilon value. The instances that are
linked to density will then be chosen. In the visiting process,
circumstances that are reachable from the core point but do
not have a minP ts value are referred to as border points. The
next unvisited point, known as a noise point or outlier, will
create a cluster of related cases immediately after the visiting
operation is finished.
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B. Data Visualization
Data visualisation is the process of displaying existing
data as an infographic, map, or table [7]. Some software
programmes and machine learning model can be used to build
patterns for data visualisation such as scattered plot, pie chart,
bar chart, box and whisker, line chart, and lastly geographic
heat map.
C. Related Work
A study by [8] visualized the data of COVID-19 cases in the
world using DBSCAN model. Based on the data visualization,
it may help the authority to learn and monitor the spread
of COVID-19 around the world. The system may help to
reduce the misinformation about COVID-19 and decrease
media social panic. The data collection is based on dataset
in the John Hopkins University from GitHub repository.
In second study by [9], the data visualization is based on
exploratory data analysis (EDA) of South Asian Association
of Regional Cooperation (SAARC). The authors observed
the number of confirmed death, recovered, and active cases
of patients that infected COVID-19 in these countries. The
machine learning model, K-Means algorithm was applied to
identify countries among SAARC based on the difference of
intensity pandemic cases. The goal is to get a prediction of
the upcoming COVID-19 pandemic progression.
Another study in India by [10] aimed to visualise the
number of healthcare facilities and residential area in city of
India, Bhubaneshwar. The visualisation, which made use of
Folium maps, may assist in regulating how medical resources
are distributed during COVID-19 in areas with a lot of people.
For clustering, the author employed HDBSCAN (Hierarchical
DBSCAN), OPTICS (Ordering Points To Identify Cluster
Structure), and DBSCAN. The authors claim that the OPTICS
algorithm’s clustering index results are better than those of the
DBSCAN and HDBSCAN algorithms. The OPTICS has extra
parameters than the DBSCAN. In order to build the cluster,
the OPTICS produces reachable plots. On the other hand,
HDBSCAN builds trees based on hierarchical clustering and
creating a multi-level tree, and the cluster is created.
III. M ETHODOLOGY
Waterfall model is used as the Software Development Life
Cycle (SDLC) technique [11]. The waterfall model has five
steps and must be performed in order, as seen in Fig. 1:
A. Requirement gathering and analysis
The goal of this phase is to collect information, data and
requirements for the proposed project. The project focuses on
using machine learning method on data visualisation and a
density-based grouping method in specific area in Malaysia.
B. System design and Implementation
This phase focuses on system development based on DB-
SCAN model.
 Fig. 1. Five phases of Waterfall model. Adapted from [11]
1) System Architecture Design: This study used machine
learning clustering technique, DBSCAN algorithm to cluster
the data based on vaccinated rate and vaccination centre. Fig.
2 show the steps for forming the clusters using DBSCAN
algorithm.
Fig. 2. Steps in DBSCAN clustering model.
2) User Interface Design: Fig. 3 shows the use case of the
project. From it, can be seen the five main features in this
system with their functionality and the particular output will
be shown for end user in each feature. The user can see the
cluster analysis of COVID-19 vaccination rate in Malaysia in
website platform using the data visualization techniques.
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Fig. 3. Use case of the proposed system with the features of the system: i)
Homepage Dashboard, ii) Adult Vaccination Rate Dashboard, iii) Adolescents
Vaccination Rate Dashboard, iv) Vaccination Rate by Area Dashboard, and
v) Vaccination Centre Dashboard.
3) System Implementation: In this implementation phase,
all the information in requirement phase and system design
are converted into source code with fully functional features.
Fig. 4 shows the four main steps of implementation phase: i)
Collecting data, ii) data pre-processing and iii) integration of
DBSCAN model in back-end system development. The back-
end implementation is using Python programming language.
Finally, the front-end or web-based development is using
HTML, CSS and JavaScript programming language.
Fig. 4. Four steps in implementation phase.
The collection of raw data is from GitHub
website: https://github.com/CITF-Malaysia/citf-
public/blob/main/CONTRIB.md. All the raw data is pre-
processed in order to transform into a usable format. There
are 33 columns and 77736 rows of data that has been
collected. The data was also has been verified for missing
values. After the data pre-processing, the clustering model
DBSCAN were used to categorize the data by state in
Malaysia. In order to achieve best results, the implementation
of machine learning model used different parameter. The
technique is called a trial and error, optimal value of eps
and M inP ts is selected to obtain the greatest number of
clusters and the smallest number of outliers. There are 6
models created in this study. All the models consists three
populations, i) overall total of adult and adolescents, adult
and adolescent, and the scope of data is range from 27
February 2021 to 30 June 2022. There are also two categories
for vaccination status: i) complete and ii) booster. Fig. 5
shows snippet codes of DBSCAN model to identify number
of cluster and outliers.
Fig. 6. Interface of geographical heat map of COVID-19 vaccination rate in
Malaysia.

Fig. 5. Snippet of DBSCAN model used in the proposed system.

Fig. 7. Interface of geographical heat map with green dots of COVID-19
vaccination centres in Malaysia.

Plotly library was used to cluster the data into data visual-
ization and there are nine visualization created in the proposed
system. However, the main visualization in the dashboard is
geographical heat map of COVID-19 vaccination in Malaysia,
shown in Fig. 6. The colour of heat is based on the percentage
of vaccination rate in each state in Malaysia. For example,
a green dot will be pinned in the map to visualize the
location of the vaccination centre, as seen in Fig. 7. Other
data visualization techniques are i) bar chart of vaccination
rate by state, ii) line chart of vaccination rate in Malaysia
by month, iii) pie chart of vaccination rate by nationality,
iv) scatter plot of vaccination rate of high-risk population,
v) bar chart of vaccine dose used, vi) grouped bar chart of
Fig. 8. Interface of bar chart of COVID-19 vaccination rate in Malaysia.
vaccination rate by area in Malaysia, vii) horizontal grouped
bar chart of vaccination rate in each area in Malaysia and viii)
bar chart of vaccination centre in Malaysia. The examples of
data visualization can be seen in Fig. 8, Fig. 9, Fig. 10 and
Fig. 11.
Fig. 12 shows the homepage of the proposed system and
other four dashboard: i) Adult vaccination rate, ii) adolescents
vaccination rate, iii) vaccination rate by area and iv) List
of vaccination centre. The dashboard can be accessed using
navigation menu on the left of the page. In vaccination rate
by area dashboard, the data shows the vaccination rate of six
areas in Malaysia: South, North, East, West, East Coast and
Wilayah Persekutuan area. In the last dashboard, the system
will allow user to find the location of vaccination centre by Fig. 9. Interface of line chart of COVID-19 vaccination rate in Malaysia.
state and city.

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 TABLE I
R ESULT OF FUNCTIONALITY TEST OF TEST CASE

Verification
Test Case
(Success/Fail)
Homepage Dashboard Success
Adult Vaccination Rate Dashboard Success
Adolescents Vaccination Rate Dashboard Success
Vaccination Rate by State Dashboard Success
Vaccination Centre Dashboard Success
Fig. 10. Interface of pie chart of COVID-19 vaccination rate in Malaysia.

TABLE II
SUS ITEMS AND RESULTS FOR EACH ITEM

Questionnaire Results (%)

I think I would love to use
1 94
this website continually.
I found the website
2 34
unnecessarily complex.
3 I found this website is informative. 98
I think that I would need the support of a
4 technical person to be able to use this 32
website’s function.
I think most functions in the website
5 98
are properly integrated.
I found there was excessive amount
6 34
of inconsistency in this website.
I would imagine that most people would
7 92
learn to use this website very instantaneously.
8 I thought the website really awkward to use. 28
Fig. 11. Interface of scatter chart of COVID-19 vaccination rate in Malaysia. 9 I felt very confident to use this website. 92
I needed to catch up a lot of stuff
10 38
before I could get along with this website.

C. Results and testing

There are three testing have been conducted in this project:
(i) functionality testing, (ii) usability testing and (iii) clustering
accuracy testing.
1) Functionality Testing: In this project, there are five
test case were tested, as shown in Table I. The objective of
functionality test it to validate the if the feature of the system
can be used or not [12]. The validation is rated as ”Success”
or Failure”. Based on the testing, the results show that all the
test case passed the testing and meet the expected outcome.
2) Usability Testing: The goal of usability testing is to
measure user’s satisfaction after using the proposed system.
One of suitable questionnaire that have been validated and
Fig. 12. Home page or dashboard of the proposed system.
available to use is System Usability Scale (SUS) [13]. The
SUS consists of then items, the items in SUS questionnaire
can be seen in Table II. In this study, 10 respondents were
invited to test the system and they were asked to rate their
feeling towards the system. The final results can be calculated
by totalling all scores for odd items and even items [14].
However, total score for odd items will be deducted 5 score,
while total score of even items will be deducted 25. Based on
the new total of odd and even items, both score is added and
the multiply by 2.5. Then the score of SUS will be in range
of 1 to 100. Higher score shows best user satisfaction after
using the system. The final score for the proposed system is
88.5% which considered the system achieved high score in the
usability testing.
3) Cluster Accuracy Testing: Cluster accuracy test using
metric assessment of silhouette coefficient is to calculate the
quality of the clustering model of the machine learning [15],
[16]. The range of the accuracy result is between -1 (low
quality model) and 1 (high quality model). In Table III shows
the accuracy result of each features (model) in the proposed
system implemented using DBSCAN algorithm. As can be
seen, the accuracy of each model is greater than 0.3, therefore,
it can be concluded that the quality of the DBSCAN technique
in clustering the collected data is good.

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 TABLE III
O UTPUT OF C LUSTERING ACCURACY T ESTING
Model Accuracy
Full vaccination for all population 0.421
Booster vaccination for all population 0.320
Full vaccination for adult population 0.418
Booster vaccination for adult population 0.316
Full vaccination for adolescent population 0.552
Booster vaccination for adolescent population 0.414
D. Documentation
In the final phase, the information about the system de-
velopment is documented. The aims of the documentation is
to provide information that all requirement in the project has
been met by the researcher.
IV. L IMITATION OF THE PROJECT AND FUTURE WORK
There are some limitations in the proposed project and
system:
1) During data collection, the raw data need to be collected
from different sources. Therefore, results in different
format of column name and increase the time complexity
when processing all the data.
2) The data used in the proposed system is not up-to-date
and the system can only process data up to June 2022.
3) Furthermore, on the heat map, the proposed system
has limited information about the vaccination centres in
Malaysia, such as address.
However, the current system can be improved in the future
work, such as:
1) The proposed system can process and analyse raw data
based on real time data. Therefore, all the information
can be updated daily automatically.
2) The address of the vaccination centre can be added
into the visualization map. Hence, increase the user
interactivity with the system.
3) The proposed system is also aim to expand the scope of
the data set, for example, the data visualization can be
categorized into children aged between 5 and 11 years
old.
V. C ONCLUSION
The proposed data visualization system is developed us-
ing Python programming language with PyCharm software.
A clustering analysis using big data visualization technique
named Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with
Noise (DBSCAN) model is used to cluster the data of inhab-
itants in each country and the proportion of full or booster
vaccination rates in Malaysia. The data was visualized in a
geographical heat map, it assists user in locating the near-
est vaccination center in their neighbourhood. The proposed
system aims to help Malaysia Government to enhance the
efforts to provide mobile vaccination centre in critical regions
to Malaysian people. The data visualization also can help
Malaysian people and Malaysia government to keep track
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the rate of COVID-19 vaccination for adult or adolescents
population in six different areas in Malaysia which is South,
North, East, West, East Coast and Wilayah Persekutuan.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The authors would like to thank Universiti Teknologi
MARA Malacca Branch, Center of Vision and Algorithms
Analytics (C-VAA), and Information Technology for Organi-
zations (ITFO) Research Groups for the support throughout
this research.
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