Edit in March 2020 :
– This post was written in May 2019.
– In 2020 the Perth weekly fuel price pattern is still observable, however the peak in prices has changed from Tuesdays to Wednesdays, the trough has remained on Mondays.
An analysis of Perth fuel prices using Power BI.
Perth fuel prices follow an unusual weekly pattern. Monday is always the cheapest day of the week to fill in your car tan. Tuesday is the most expensive and then prices gradually decline until the next Monday.
While it is a pattern very well known by Sandgropers, lots of newcomers in Perth are not aware of this. Myself, it took me a while to become aware of this and I know some of my non-WA born friends in Perth have for years missed it. This weekly pattern is very WA specific. In France – where I lived for 30 years – prices are not seasonal. Even in Australia, WA is the only state with weekly seasonality. It is well documented on the ACC website. Prices have some patterns in other Australian States, but not the highly predictable weekly WA patterns.
Plan to analyse fuel prices
In order to better understand the weekly seasonality of car fuel prices in WA, I used Power BI and Python to analyse the data with the following goals:
- Does the weekly pattern always occur in WA?
- Are there differences between WA regions?
Then focus on Perth metro unleaded fuel prices and try to answer the following questions:
- On top of the weekly seasonality are there other trends?
- What is the price difference of Mondays compared to other days?
- Are some distributors more expensive than others?
- Are some fuel stations always cheaper then the others?
- If not on a Monday, are some fuel station offering good deal? Is it consistent over time
And also to do a bit of forecasting:
- Is it possible to accurately forecast the fuel price over the next 15 days? The forecast of the average daily price and the forecast of specific fuel station.
I envisage to use regression methodologies and also more advanced techniques such as machine learning if the accuracy is not satisfying.
Data Sources
Fuel prices data are from Fuel Watch.
Brent prices are from Datahub.io.
Exchange rates are from from Reserve Bank of Australia.
GPS coordinates are from Google Maps API.
Below is a screenshot of FuelWatch where I retrieve the historical fuel prices data:
Each zip file has the data for a month. Of course you can click on each file and download them one by one but I figured out it would be more rewarding to automate the process in Python.
Once I managed to get some historical data, the question become how could I get a daily update of the fuel prices.
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