Countries That are Twins

In this video each of about 170 countries is matched with a statistical "twin" based on similarity of population, area, GDP per capita and life expectancy. For each factor, the algorithm finds the closest country based on both similarity of the actual value and the rank. For instance, United States has about one billion less inhabitants than India, but is very close in population rank (third largest vs second largest).

All data is from the World Bank, and I included all countries that had values on all four variables.

The algorithm takes the average similarity of both these things and assigns it a similarity score of between 0 and 100 percent. The "twin" is the country with the highest sum score on all four factors. It is just for fun, and with other chosen factors or matching methods the results would be different. But I think many of the "twins" are quite intuitive!

The actual values for each country are displayed next to the percentages. Green color means that the country is among the top 25%, and red color that it is in the bottom 25%.

Timestamps:
00:00 Europe and Central Asia
01:36 Americas and the Caribbean
02:29 East Asia and the Pacific
03:09 South Asia
03:24 Middle East and North Africa
04:04 Sub-saharan Africa

Music: ELFL - Octadrone VI and ELFL - Alienated, both from www.epidemicsound.com