Scholarly record

ECONOMIC FACTORS DETERMINING EFFECTIVE COUNTERACTING TO ILLEGAL DRUG TRADE

A. Naydyonov, I. Krivenko

Abstract

The article is devoted to the research of factors, which determine the effective counteracting a drug addiction and an illegal drug trade. The factors include those from economic, social, institutional and administrative fields of governmental policy. The methodology of research is based on preliminary studies aimed to identifying factors of social and economic environment influencing drug addiction in order to verify the hypothesis that drug addiction is more economic problem than social or medical. We have built models based on Decision Making machine learning algorithm, which brings us to understanding the hierarchy of influencing factors. The decision making model was applied to preliminary clustered data due to the fact of huge diversity of Russian regions. The clustering techniques were the following: k-means, agglomerative clustering, etc. Clustering helped us to eliminate diversification between Russia regions in terms of the typology of drug situation. In the foundation of the model there are two vectors: factors of demand and supply of drugs, among which are the following: unemployment, poverty, income, social justice and social protection, mentality and cultural level, education level, etc. (demand factors); crime level, corruption in society, geographical location, neighborhood with countries of drug production, etc. (supply factors). We have applied cross-validation technique in order to prove model performance and quality, also validation on off-time data was made. As a model quality metric the mean squared error was used. Model shows good accuracy and was further applied to revealing the factors, which determine the directions of effective counteraction of drug addiction and illegal drug trade in form of hierarchically prioritized indicators, which should be noticed by government policy.

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