EDA PROJECT— Why are citizens in some countries happier than others?

BERFİN SARIOĞLU
4 min readAug 15, 2020

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I searched for data on a topic that interests me and found the happines world score report data from the kaggle. This report is an important survey of the state of global happiness and look at the state of happiness in the world today and observe how the new science of happiness explains personal and national variations in happiness.

My main questions can be listed as follows: “Why is there such a big difference in happiness scores between countries? Why are some people happier than others? What features affect this situation?”. I applied Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) on the data to answer these questions.

Variables:

•Country : Name of the country

•Region : Region the country belongs to.

•Happiness Score (0 to 10) : 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.”

•Economy (GDP per Capita)

•Family (Social Support)

•Health (Life Expectancy)

•Freedom

•Trust (Government Corruption)

•Generosity

GDP per Capita, Family, Life Expectancy, Freedom, Generosity, Trust Government Corruption describe the extent to which these factors contribute in evaluating the happiness in each country.

After examining the data, I started the visualization using “plotly”.

We can observe how the happiness score varies from country to country with this graph.

While trying to make sense of the map chart, examining this table I created using “group by” helps us understand.

It is seen that the happiness score is too high or too low in certain regions. It can be said that there is a concentration on the basis of regions rather than countries.

North America , Western Europe and Australia and Oceania regions have high happiness score, besides Africa regions have really low happiness score.

Okey, that was expected. But why? What are the variables that affect this?

Let’s see the correlations by using heat map.

Happiness score has strong correlation with economy, family , health features and weak correlation trust and generosity features.

I used the bar chart to better examine my economy feature.

Bar chart for economy

This confirms that economy and score are strongly correlated because we see that in regions where the happiness score is high, the economy feature also has a high score.

We can also examine economy deeply by using map plot as below.

To examine the relationships between features I applied joinplot. I selected economy features for x-axis because it has the highest correlation with happiness score. For y-axis I selected two features: family and trust. The reasons have same logic as economy. Family is second from start , trust is second from last according to the correlation with the happiness score.

It is seen that economy and family have a more linear relationship and they are more correlated than economy and trust.

Next, there are violin plots that I used to examine the variability range of values.

Violin Plot

The results I got from this graph are as follows;

Economy and family features vary significantly from country to country. There is no concentration in a certain place, the graph has not grown fat anywhere, on the contrary, its variability is very high.

Trust and generosity variables are concentrated in a certain place, which means that the trust score between countries has the same values ​​on average. Trust score does not vary from country to country. This observation caught my attention and I used the map chart to examine it more closely.

When I examined the trust variable closely, I came to a funny conclusion.
There is no trust in government anywhere in the world except Norway, Sweden and Finland!
But in addition, there is a low correlation between trust in government and people’s happiness.

It’s up to you to ponder why more deeply. If I get into the sociological dimensions of the work, the subject gets too long, I just wanted to give a general opinion. I hope it was useful.

GitHub: https://github.com/berfinsarioglu/world-happiness-report-EDA

Kaggle: https://www.kaggle.com/unsdsn/world-happiness

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