Estimating the Quality of Life Using Weighted Principal Components Method

Abstract

The paper proposes development of the approach to the construction of an integrated indicator of the population quality of life using the first principal component. We introduce the weighting coefficients into the principal component for the restoration quality of the initial features’ variation in the integrated indicator (II). That is, a number of variables is assigned more valuable in the first principal component and the preservation of variations of which in II is preferable. For the case of the II, it was shown that the tar-get functional with weights can be reduced to the well-known problem of finding the first principal component without weights. Moreover, the paper proposes objective approach for finding these weighting coefficients based on the migration statistics. In accordance with this methodology original countries’ ranking based on the integrated indicator of Quality of Life (II QoL) was carried out.