Summary:
We collected and examined annual world data. Our primary sources were The World Happiness Reports, an annual publication of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, powered by data from the Gallup World Poll. The reports survey the state of global happiness and ranks 155 countries by their happiness levels. The reports review the state of happiness in the world today. Governments, organizations, and civil societies increasingly use happiness indicators to inform their policy-making decisions. We used additional world data with the survey data to analyze historical global trends and their effect on happiness levels. We applied linear regression to the data to make predictions on future world happiness.
The table below represents our predictions for the next 5 years of the top 5 happiest countries and the 5 least happy countries as well as the countries whose happiness scores increased and decreased by the greatest magnitudes.
Top 5 Happiness |
5 Least Happy |
Biggest Movers |
|||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Now |
2025 |
Now |
2025 |
Gainers |
Losers |
Finland |
Finland |
Afghanistan |
Zimbabwe |
Benin |
Venezuela |
Denmark |
Denmark |
South Sudan |
Afghanistan |
Ivory Coast |
Zambia |
Switzerland |
Netherlands |
Zimbabwe |
Malawi |
Togo |
Zimbabwe |
Iceland |
United Kingdom |
Rwanda |
Botswana |
Honduras |
Malawi |
Norway |
Norway |
Central African Republic |
Zambia |
Burkina Faso |
Haiti |
We used machine learning to first predict the happiness of the country for the next 5 years. Due to us only having data from 2015-2020, we did not want to predict further than 2025. Finally, we used machine learning to run a train-test split to test how accurate the different indicators chosen really were in predicting the happiness of a country.