RESEARCH ARTICLE


Alcohol Consumption and Age in Thailand from 2006 to 2011: An Exploration of Non-Linear Relationships



Pannapa Changpetch1, *, Dominique Haughton2
1 Department of Mathematical Sciences, Bentley University, Waltham, MA, USA
2 Department of Mathematical Sciences and Global Studies, Bentley University, Waltham, MA, USA
Affiliated Researcher, Paris 1 University (SAMM), Paris, France
Affiliated Researcher, Toulouse 1 University (TSE-R), Toulouse, France


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Creative Commons License
© 2017 Changpetch and Haughton

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Department of Mathematical Sciences, Bentley University, Waltham, MA, USA; Tel: 781-891-2267; E-mail: pchangpetch@bentley.edu


Abstract

Background:

In this paper, we investigate how household alcohol consumption in Thailand relates to the age of the head of household.

Methods:

We use datasets drawn from socio-economic surveys of Thai households conducted during the period of 2006–2011, and we use Treenet, a data-mining technique, to investigate nonlinear relationships between response and predictors. Our study shows that households with a head of household aged between 25 and 30 years old were the most likely to consume alcohol at home and that this likelihood decreased after the age of 30.

Results:

Our results also reveal that the proportion of total household expenditure allocated to alcohol decreased over time, but in different ways for different age groups. Moreover, we find that the gaps in alcohol spending across the different age groups tend to become smaller over time. Our results suggest that Thai government policies seem to have been accompanied by a relative decrease in alcohol consumption by younger groups.

Keywords: Nonlinear relationships, Alcohol consumption, Alcohol spending, Treenet, Gradient boosting, Age.