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In trying to explain why Hong Kong of China ranks highest in life expectancy in the world, we review what various experts are hypothesizing, and how data science methods may be used to provide more evidence-based conclusions. While more data become available, we find some data analysis studies were too simplistic, while others too overwhelming in answering this challenging question. We find the approach that analyzes life expectancy related data (mortality causes and rate for different cohorts) inspiring, and use this approach to study a carefully selected set of targets for comparison. In discussing the factors that matter, we argue that it is more reasonable to try to identify a set of factors that together explain the phenomenon.


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Why Hong Kong Ranks Highest in Life Expectancy: Looking for Answers from Data Science and Social Sciences

Show Author's information Ting Xu1Ming-sum Tsui2Dah Ming Chiu3( )
Department of Information Engineering, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong 999077, China
Felizberta Lo Padilla Tong School of Social Sciences, Caritas Institute of Higher Education, Hong Kong 999077, China
Department of Information Engineering, Chinese University of Hong Kong, and also with Data Science Research Center, Caritas Institute of Higher Education, Hong Kong 999077, China

Abstract

In trying to explain why Hong Kong of China ranks highest in life expectancy in the world, we review what various experts are hypothesizing, and how data science methods may be used to provide more evidence-based conclusions. While more data become available, we find some data analysis studies were too simplistic, while others too overwhelming in answering this challenging question. We find the approach that analyzes life expectancy related data (mortality causes and rate for different cohorts) inspiring, and use this approach to study a carefully selected set of targets for comparison. In discussing the factors that matter, we argue that it is more reasonable to try to identify a set of factors that together explain the phenomenon.

Keywords: data science, life expectancy, social science, population

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Received: 30 April 2022
Revised: 21 June 2022
Accepted: 13 August 2022
Published: 30 September 2022
Issue date: September 2022

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The articles published in this open access journal are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

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