STATISTICAL CLASSIFICATION STUDY OF COUNTRIES’ HUMAN DEVELOPMENT LEVEL BY DISCRIMINANT ANALYSIS

The classification done by human development index comes into prominence through countries, which take into consideration the level of development instead of economic growth. the united nations development programme has been classifying countries by using this index since 1990. the aims of this study are to determine the importance of the variables used for preparing human development index and by developing the discriminant function, providing classification with fewer variables for the future. in this analysis, the classification of the human development index by united nations development programme (undp) is examined and necessary transformations for ensuring a discriminant analysis of the examined data are made. the obtained variables are then used in a discriminant analysis. one discriminant function is constructed since only very developed and mid-developed country-groups are analyzed. as a result, a function with a high classification success of 92.5% is obtained. interpretation of the coefficients of variables involved in the function and the effect of variables on classification have been analyzed.