Comparison of Methods for Identifying the Determinants of the Standard of Living Cover Image

Komparácia metód identifikácie determinantov životnej úrovne
Comparison of Methods for Identifying the Determinants of the Standard of Living

Author(s): Naďa Birčiaková, Jana Stávková, Oldřich Trenz
Subject(s): Economy, Socio-Economic Research
Published by: Ekonomický ústav SAV a Prognostický ústav SAV
Keywords: factors; standard of living; principal component analysis; data mining; feature selection;

Summary/Abstract: The article deals with the identification of factors of the standard of living. Ambiguous definition of the term “standard of living” requires for its quantification sufficient theoretical knowledge from the methodology field. The principal component analysis (PCA) was used to reduce the extensive amount of factors of the standard of living as well as for the determining of the most important ones. Data mining was used to compare the use of the PCA with various classification algorithms and later on it was tested with developments of the feature selection. The methods were applied on the sample of 2 783 respondents from 5 EU countries which represents areas of cultural similarities. The result of this effort is reduction from 99 considered factors of standard of living to final 45. Data mining helped to exclude 30 attributes and thus the final amount is set to 69. In case of comparison of these methods and their results it seems more appropriate the PCA over the feature selection method.

  • Issue Year: 63/2016
  • Issue No: 06
  • Page Range: 560-574
  • Page Count: 15
  • Language: Slovak
Toggle Accessibility Mode