Clustering countries according to the world happiness report 2019

摘要

Since the first initiative in 2012, the World Happiness Report (WHR) has drawn international attention as it can help the policymakers to evaluate their policy options. In the 2019 edition, the WHR introduced six factors to describe the variation of happiness across the countries. Finland is declared as the happiest country just like what they did in the previous year. This study tried to cluster the countries according to the WHR 2019. Nine clustering algorithms were presented, and three internal validation indices were utilized to compare the algorithms. k-medoids algorithm was selected to illustrate how three distinguished clusters generated from the algorithm are different from each other. This study is expected to give an insight into how to implement clustering algorithms into the real-world data set and how to interpret the results.