In collaboration with Chiara Munari.
The aim of the current report is to explore the situation about human freedom around the world. In order to do so, we exploited the dataset of 2016 Human Freedom Index found at the following link: https://www.kaggle.com/gsutters/the-human-freedom-index
The concept of freedom is extremely complex and its measurement involves several aspects of social life, ranging from freedom to trade, to use sound money (or similar economic activities), to the right of civil liberties, such as freedom of speech, religion, association and assembly. For this reason, the Human Freedom Index is calculated aggregating more than 80 indicators measuring different aspects of personal, civil and economic freedom. To provide an accurate estimate of human freedom in various countries is a valuable resource that can help to raise awareness on dangerous situations or to uncover patterns and relationship between freedom and other social and economic phenomena.
Nowadays, people from western countries usually think that freedom is broadly recognised and its higher level is already reached in the majority of countries of the world. Stereotypes tend to classify as "not free" countries the ones of Africa or Asia, while considering European and North American coutries reaching the best scores in human freedom ranking. This is not always true. Stereotypes provide a rough image of the reality, but to go deeper into that and to depict it better is is necessary to go beyond semplifications.
Our purpose in this report is to perform an accurate explorative analysis of the data about the freedom index for the years from 2008 to 2016, highlighting the most interesting features in the dataset. Moreover, we performed some classification analysis using various techniques (KNN, k-means clustering and hierarchical clustering), to uncover remarkable patterns or subgroups of the data.