Using machine learning to uncover the relation between age and life satisfaction

Abstract This study applies a machine learning (ML) approach to around 400,000 observations from the German Socio-Economic Panel to assess the relation between life satisfaction and age. We show that with our ML-based approach it is possible to isolate the effect of age on life satisfaction across the lifecycle without explicitly parameterizing the complex relationship between age and other covariates—this complex relation is taken into account by a feedforward neural network. Our results show a clear U-shape relation between age and life satisfaction across the lifespan, with a minimum at around 50 years of age.