Data analysis of electricity bills

Electricity Bill Summary Report

From the review of the data, the Singapore market electricity bill increased on average in 2020 relative to the electricity bill in 2019. The mean, or average bill in Singapore based on the sample size of 50 users was 31.03. This figure indicates that consumption was higher in the 2020 period on average due in part to the increase in electricity consumption during COVID-19. Although the average was higher, the overall dispersion of values was also high. Here the largest value related to electricity usage was 54.2 with the lowest value being 15.8. This large disparity in values tends to indicate other variables may be influencing the figures outside of COVID-19. As a result, another variable or a combination of variable may be responsible for consumer electricity usage within the Singapore market as indicated by the large disparity in values. This is validated by the positive skewness of the distribution as both the median and mode are lower than the mean. Here the mode, or most frequently occurring figure of 25 is less than the mean indicating that a few outliers within the distribution are having a disproportionate impact on the overall data analysis. These observations may be contributing to the very large standard deviation of 8.4. Here, only one standard deviation away from the mean would indicate that roughly 68% of the observations will be found between the value of 23 and 38. This is a particularly large discrepancy of electricity usage between consumers (Bhattacharyya, 1997).

Overall, the data indicates that Mr. Tan’s hypothesis of a $5 increase in average electricity usage in the Singapore market is correct. However, more data is required to determine if COVID-19 was the overall cause of this increase. Here, the average values of the electricity bills do indicate that the average has increased from 2019 to 2020. However, the large standard deviation, the large range of values, and the positive skewness indicate that other variable may have a greater influence on electricity usage than COVID-19.