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Evaluating the impact of a grouping variable on Job Satisfaction drivers

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Abstract

An important issue in Job Satisfaction analysis is to discover the most important drivers of the workers’ overall satisfaction. This can be investigated by means of data mining techniques able to measure the importance of a covariate in the prediction of a given outcome. Variable importance measures are mainly proposed in the literature in the framework of tree-based learning ensembles, like Random Forests or Gradient Boosting Machine. In this paper a Random Forest variable importance measure is used for mining the drivers of Job Satisfaction in the Social Service sector. In addition an innovative algorithmic procedure is proposed in order to assess the impact of a grouping variable on this variable importance measure. The goal is to investigate if the importance of a Job Satisfaction driver is different for subjects belonging to different groups.

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Correspondence to Paola Zuccolotto.

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Zuccolotto, P. Evaluating the impact of a grouping variable on Job Satisfaction drivers. Stat Methods Appl 19, 287–305 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10260-010-0141-0

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