Data1002 group assignment!
- Eileen Wang
- Yiran Jing
Pursuing happiness has always been a fundamental part of human nature, with some arguing that it is the reason why we strive for success, maintain relationships and do more than just exist. Philosophically and semantically, one can easily define happiness and describe what constitutes this feeling. However, given that happiness is an intangible feeling that is subjective depending on the individual, happiness is often difficult to compare and measure, especially between people among different cultures. Nevertheless, past studies and literature have attempted to quantify happiness using a combination of subjective measures such as responses from surveys and objective numerical measures like life expectancy and financial measures. Such studies have given rise to the term ‘happiness economics’, an academic field which grew extensively during the late 20th century. ‘Happiness economics’ or the ‘economics of happiness’ is the theoretical and quantitative study of the relationship between happiness, well-being, or life satisfaction with factors derived from sociological and economic indicators. In our research, we analyse a dataset containing happiness scores for each country with corresponding subjective and objective measures in an attempt to answer the following questions:
- On average, is there an increasing or decreasing trend in happiness scores overtime for specific countries?
- Which countries and which specific regions tend to have higher happiness scores?
- What determinants lead to higher happiness scores for a country?
- Do nations that report higher/lower levels of happiness demonstrate consistent patterns in factors that influence happiness?
- What are some other interesting relationships/insights found in our dataset (that is not necessarily related to happiness scores)?
- Varibale selection
- Linear regression
- Regression based on k-nearest neighbours
- Regression Trees
- Model Comparison