Predicting the Happiness of a Nation: An Explanation on the Factors of Country Morale

Started Apr. 4, 2022

Abstract or project description

World leaders across the globe are looking into the factors that determine the happiness of their citizens, something incredibly important but often overlooked today. However, pinpointing the best one is difficult because there are a multitude of potentially relevant factors and a limited resource pool with which to maximize each. Trying to decipher which traits decide happiness becomes troublesome under the sheer magnitude of available data. The World Happiness Report is a global attempt moderated by a team of experts to rank and score every country based on the happiness of their citizens, released yearly under the World Happiness Report. We propose several regression-based models to predict the scoring of a country based on a multitude of factors generally considered whenever a country is scored on the WHI. Some of these factors include the economic state, health and life expectancy, and education. Political leaders could employ our model to get a better idea of what attributes create the most impact on a countries’ scoring or an average citizen could use the model to understand what their country is doing well in and on what their country could improve. The benefits of increasing the happiness of any countries’ citizens are plenty, such as increased productivity (increasing economic prowess,) less crime, and astronomically lower healthcare costs/suicide rates/drug overdoses.