Evolutionary Path of Factors Influencing Life Satisfaction among Chinese Elderly: A Perspective of Data Visualization

China has the largest aging population of all countries and faces severe aging issues. As an important indicator to measure the quality of life, the life satisfaction of elderly Chinese people has received increasing attention. Based on the cross-sectional survey data collected from 2002 to 2014, which were provided by the CLHLS (Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey) project as open datasets, this study investigated how the influence and importance of factors associated with life satisfaction in the elderly have changed during these years. In view of previous research and questionnaire data, demographic, physiological, psychological, economic and social characteristics were selected as potential influencing factors of life satisfaction. With the R programming language, we used IV (information value) as the indicator to measure the influence of associated factors and determined the importance of each factor by establishing a random forest model for each year. Data visualization was used to demonstrate change in each factor with the Microsofot PowerPoint 2016. The results show that, for most factors, their influence has fluctuated. Since 2002, the most significant factors have always been self-rated health, self-evaluation of economic level, economic self-sufficiency and bright personality.