Analyzing the Impact of Investment in Education and R&D on Economic Welfare with Data Mining

Has greater investment in education and research and development (R&D) a positive impact on economic welfare? We analyzed this question using the Weka machine learning and data mining systems. We collected data from the statistical databases for the year 2001. The obtained classification trees show that the level of participation in higher levels of education has a high impact on economic welfare mainly through more and better educated individuals. Moreover, the indicator of investment in R&D is being assessed as an important promoter of economic welfare. With the resulting classification trees we can with the 70% accuracy predict the income class of the country on the basis of its education and R&D.