A combination-based machine learning algorithm estimating impacts of social, economic, and environmental on resident health—on China’s provincial panel data

Abstract

The factors influencing residents health have become complex and intertwined with the development of economy and society. Traditional research with a single factor on health will not provide an accurate picture of the situation. This paper collects data on economic, environmental and social factors to estimate their impact on regional health. Considering the data is multi-source and complex, this paper proposes a combined feature importance algorithm, which weighted the feature importance of RF, XGB and SOIL. The algorithm does not depend on the data and adaptively approximates the true results. The results show that economic factors have a significant and direct impact on health, environmental factors have a lag correlation with health level, and social factors have a more complicated effect on health. Finally, we provide policy suggestions for health on economic, environmental, and social development.