Given basic factors of a country (e.g. GDP, Alcoholism, Life Expectancy, etc.), can we predict what score will it have on the Global Happiness Index?

Started Apr. 4, 2022

Abstract or project description

World leaders across the globe are interested in what goes into the happiness of their citizens, one of the most important things that any country needs to understand. This is difficult because there are a multitude of potentially relevant factors and a limited resource pool with which to maximize each. With so many other factors that a country needs to consider, happiness often is lost to the more depressing statistics to think about. Happiness is much more important than many believe, however. Political and economic leaders are understanding this, but trying to decipher which traits decide happiness becomes very troublesome under the sheer magnitude of available data. The World Happiness Index is a global attempt moderated by a team of experts to rank and score every country based on the happiness of their citizens. 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. There is a virtually infinite number of factors that could be added simply to ponder whether or not they could be considered as something that could change the happiness of a country. 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.