What is World Happiness Index ?
By: Denil Gabani
Tags: Machine Learning, Country, Data Science, Data Visualization, Exploratory Data Analysis

The World happiness is the global happiness that ranks 156 countries by how happy their citizens perceive themselves to be.

The World Happiness Report is an annual publication of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network. It contains articles, and rankings of national happiness based on respondent ratings of their own lives, which the report also correlates with various life factors.

Now the next question is “How the happiness calculates from 156 different countries?”

The rankings of national happiness are based on a Cantril ladder survey. Nationally representative samples of respondents are asked to think of a ladder, with the best possible life for them being a 10, and the worst possible life being a 0. They are then asked to rate their own current lives on that 0 to 10 scale.

The report correlates the results with various life factors.

If you want full code or dataset click on this link: https://www.kaggle.com/dgtech/world-happiness-with-basic-visualization-and-eda

Which parameters or factors are used for calculate Overall rank (Rank of the country based on the Happiness Score) of a Country?

Score: A metric measured in 2015 by asking the sampled people the question: “How would you rate your happiness on a scale of 0 to 10 where 10 is the happiest.”

GDP per capita: The extent to which GDP contributes to the calculation of the Happiness Score.

Health life expectancy: The extent to which Life expectancy contributed to the calculation of the Happiness Score

Freedom to make life choices: The extent to which Freedom contributed to the calculation of the Happiness Score.

Perceptions of corruption: The extent to which Perception of Corruption contributes to Happiness Score.

Generosity: The extent to which Generosity contributed to the calculation of the Happiness Score.

World Happiness 2019 dataset

In the data only ‘Country’ is in the text all others features are numerical. So let’s calculate mean, standard deviation, five quantiles etc…

Statistics of numerical data

How is the Happiness Score is distributed?

As you can see below happiness score has values above 2.85 and below 7.76. So there is no single country which has happiness score above 8.

Distribution of Happiness Score

Let’s see relationship between different features with happiness score.

1. GDP per capita

Relationship between GDP per capita(Economy of country) has positive strong relationship with happiness score.

So If GDP per Capita of a country is high than Happiness Score of that country also more likely to high.

Happiness Score vs GDP er capita (Economy)

Top 10 Countries with high GDP (Economy)

Top 10 Countries with highest GDP

2. Perceptions of corruption

Distribution of Perceptions of corruption rightly skewed that means very less number of country has high perceptions of corruption. That means most of the country has corruption problem.

As we know Corruption is a very big problem for World.

Corruption is a cancer: a cancer that eats away at a citizen’s faith in democracy, diminishes the instinct for innovation and creativity; already-tight national budgets, crowding out important national investments. It wastes the talent of entire generations. It scares away investments and jobs . -Joe Biden

How corruption can impact on Happiness Score?

Perceptions of corruption data is highly skewed no wonder why the data has weak linear relationship, but as you can see in scatter plot most of the data points are on left side and most of the countries with low perceptions of corruption has happiness score between 4 to 6.

Countries with high perception score has high happiness score above 7.

Top 10 Countries with high Perceptions of corruption

3. Healthy life expectancy

He who has health has hope, and he who has hope has everything. -Arabian Proverb

Healthy life expectancy has strong and positive relationship with happiness score.

So If country has High life expectancy it can also have high happiness score. This make sense because anyone who has very long healthy life he/she is obviously happy.

I will be also happy if i get long healthy life. What you say?

Top 10 Countries with high Healthy life expectancy

4. Social Support

When a person is down in the world, an ounce of help is better than a pound of preaching. -Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

Social support of countries also have strong and positive relationship with happiness score.

Also relationship with happiness score needs to be strong because more you will help socially more you will be happy.

Top 10 Countries with high Social Support

5. Freedom to make life choices

We are the creative force of our life, and through our own decisions rather than our conditions, if we carefully learn to do certain things, we can accomplish those goals. — Stephen Covey

Freedom to make life choices has positive relationship with happiness score. This relation make sense because of more you will get freedom to make decision about your life more you will be happy.

Top 10 Countries with high Freedom to make life choices

6. Generosity

Generosity has very weak linear relationship with Happiness score. Suddenly we get question in our mind that,

Why the generosity has not linear relationship with happiness score?

Generosity score based on the countries which gives the most to nonprofits around the world. Countries which are not generous that does not mean they are not happy.

Top 10 Countries with high Generosity

How one feature is related to another feature?

Below heatmap shows correlation between features.

Happiness score is highly correlated with

GDP per capita > Social support==Healthy life expectancy>Freedom to make life choices>Perceptions of corruption

Happiness score is not much correlated with Generosity.

Top 10 Countries with high Happiness Score

So Finland is world’s happiness country.

Currently Finland’s government considering to apply a new idea which is to work only 4 days per week (for more detail click here). No wonder why Finland is world’s most happiness country. This idea needs to apply in all country what you say ? 😆

You can see above world’s top 10 countries in happiness they don’t have much difference between the happiness score.

Now Let’s compare the top 5 countries in happiness with different features.

As you can see above, The first country in happiness Finland has high generosity, GDP and healthy life expectancy than other 4 countries.

For Visualize happiness score between 2016 to 2019 on the geographic map go here : https://www.kaggle.com/dgtech/world-happiness-with-basic-visualization-and-eda