Exploring and visualizing household electricity consumption patterns in Singapore: A geospatial analytics approach

• Main Authors: TAN, Yong Ying, KAM, Tin Seong
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2019
• Subjects: Electricity Consumption; Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis; Spa-tial Autocorrelation; MITB student; Asian Studies; Data Science; Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4376; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/5379/viewcontent/iConference_Exploring_and_Visualising_Household_Electricity_Final.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Despite being a small country-state, electricity consumption in Singa-pore is said to be non-homogeneous, as exploratory data analysis showed that the distributions of electricity consumption differ across and within administrative boundaries and dwelling types. Local indicators of spatial association (LISA) were calculated for public housing postal codes using June 2016 data to discover local clusters of households based on electricity consumption patterns. A detailed walkthrough of the analytical process is outlined to describe the R packages and framework used in the R environment. The LISA results are visualized on three levels: country level, regional level and planning subzone level. At all levels we observe that households do cluster together based on their electricity consump-tion. By faceting the visualizations by dwelling type, electricity consumption of planning subzones can be said to fall under one of these three profiles: low-con-sumption subzone, high-consumption subzone and mixed-consumption subzone. These categories describe how consumption differs across different dwelling types in the same postal code (HDB block). LISA visualizations can guide elec-tricity retailers to make informed business decisions, such as the geographical zones to enter, and the variety and pricing of plans to offer to consumers.