DOI: 10.36347/sjpms.2021.v08i03.001

Pages: 45-61

Purpose: Philosophers and many modern-day researchers are convinced by the fact that the pursuit of happiness is the ultimate goal for humankind. Aristotle believed that the utmost goal of human life was eudaimonia (interpreted as “happiness,” “human flourishing,” or “a good life.”). Recently, many economists and physiologists have been doing applied research in the areas of subjective well-being (SWB) or happiness and trying to understand how it improves the quality of life of individual beings. Thus, searching for a data-driven analytical model is crucial to predict SWB and enhance the quality of life. Methods: Our present study utilizes the world happiness database obtained from the GallupWorld Poll on the happiness of 156 countries. However, our study focuses on using only the data of fiftyfour developed countries, based on the human development index (HDI). We have developed a non-linear analytical model that predicts the average happiness score based on eleven risk factors with a high degree of accuracy. We also compared our analytical model with three other statistical models, and our model outperformed the rest of the three in terms of RMSE and MAE. Results: Our analytical model includes five important findings. The response of the proposed model is the average score of happiness of individuals in developed countries. In addition to predicting the happiness score, our model identifies the individual risk factors and their corresponding interactions that significantly contribute to happiness. We rank these risk factors by their percentage of contributions to the happiness score. We also proceed to rank the developed countries with respect to their predicted happiness score from our developed model. From our study, we found Finland being number one, followed by Denmark. The U.S is fifth and Romania being 54th. Conclusion: The proposed model offers other useful information on the subject area. Our analytical model has been validated and tested to be of high....