An application of a supervised machine learning model for predicting life expectancy

Abstract

The social and financial systems of many nations throughout the world are significantly impacted by life expectancy (LE) models. Numerous studies have pointed out the crucial effects that life expectancy projections will have on societal issues and the administration of the global healthcare system. The computation of life expectancy has primarily entailed building an ordinary life table. However, the life table is limited by its long duration, the assumption of homogeneity of cohorts and censoring. As a result, a robust and more accurate approach is inevitable. In this study, a supervised machine learning model for estimating life expectancy rates is developed. The model takes into consideration health, socioeconomic, and behavioral characteristics by using the eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) algorithm to data from 193 UN member states. The effectiveness of the model’s prediction is compared to that of the Random Forest (RF) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) regressors utilized in earlier research. XGBoost attains an MAE and an RMSE of 1.554 and 2.402, respectively outperforming the RF and ANN models that achieved MAE and RMSE values of 7.938 and 11.304, and 3.86 and 5.002, respectively. The overall results of this study support XGBoost as a reliable and efficient model for estimating life expectancy.