Analysis of Factors Affecting China’s Demographic Fertility Transition: A Random Forest Algorithm Approach

The aims of this research are to analyze the four sectors of influences on China's fertility transition in terms of social development, economy, education, and policies by random forest algorithm, and combine them with the classical theory of demographic transition to compare the differences among the three stages of China's demographic transition periods, 1949–1977, 1978–2001, and 2002–2022. This paper collects annual data from different databases on 18 influential features including fertility. The data were preprocessed by data cleaning, data filling, and other methods to improve the accuracy of the model. According to the results of Gini important features ranking, the main reasons affecting the fertility transition in China have gone through three stages of evolution, from “satisfying basic survival needs” to “pursuing self-development and wealth accumulation in order to improve the standard of living” to “Self-value realization and improvement of the quality of life”. Based on these findings, several insights are provided in terms of government policy to current policies on fertility and social welfare systems.