"So the list of locations above will no doubt surprise some people, but this is what the data and our machine learning model has created"
Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire.
The town topped a list of of ‘Best Places in the UK’ after considering living expenses, safety & infrastructure, healthcare, restaurants & shopping, the environment, culture, attractiveness to families, and education & employment.
Other top locations in the UK included Richmond (Greater London), Hale (Greater Manchester) and Harrow (Greater London). Hebden Bridge also featured in the best seven places globally, ranking at number five behind the overall winner, West Perth in Australia.
1: West Perth, Australia
2: Feijenoord, Rotterdam, Netherlands
3: New York, NY, United States
4: Sandy Bay, Australia
5: Hebden Bridge, United Kingdom
6: Zurich, Switzerland
7: Woodinville, WA, United States
Information that was analysed included weather, the job market, healthcare, price indices, environmental pollution, public transportation, and green spaces. This was combined with indicators for quality of life, for instance, the price of common groceries such as a kilogram of bananas, the distance covered by pavements, the number of trees, the width of footpaths and the number of hours a person spends in traffic jams each year.
John Spooner, Head of Data Science at SAS UK & Ireland, had this to say: “The data doesn’t lie. When putting together a conventional survey, it’s all too easy for unconscious bias to creep in when selecting the criteria to use when determining which data should be collected and analysed. For Paradise Found, however, we processed all the available data and allowed machine learning algorithms to decide which criteria are truly important. This way, no aspect can be ignored simply because no one was looking for it.
So the list of locations above will no doubt surprise some people, but this is what the data and our machine learning model has created. This demonstrates the power of analytics as it can be used to find answers to questions that might differ from what people might expect based purely on gut instinct or their own particular views.”
