Supervised Machine-Learning Predictive Analytics for National Quality of Life Scoring

Abstract

For many years there has been a focus on individual welfare and societal advancement. In addition to the economic system, diverse experiences and the habitats of people are crucial factors that contribute to the well-being and progress of the nation. The predictor of quality of life called the Better Life Index (BLI) visualizes and compares key elements—environment, jobs, health, civic engagement, governance, education, access to services, housing, community, and income—that contribute to well-being in different countries. This paper presents a supervised machine-learning analytical model that predicts the life satisfaction score of any specific country based on these given parameters. This work is a stacked generalization based on a novel approach that combines different machine-learning approaches to generate a meta-machine-learning model that further aids in maximizing prediction accuracy. The work utilized an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) regional statistics dataset with four years of data, from 2014 to 2017. The novel model achieved a high root mean squared error (RMSE) value of 0.3 with 10-fold cross-validation on the balanced class data. Compared to base models, the ensemble model based on the stacked generalization framework was a significantly better predictor of the life satisfaction of a nation. It is clear from the results that the ensemble model presents more precise and consistent predictions in comparison to the base learners.